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M.C. MIGEL LIBRARY
AMERICAN PRINTING
HOUSE FOR THE BLIND

OUR EXAGMINATION
ROUND HIS FACTIFICATION
FOR INCAMINATION
OF WORK IN PROGRESS

. CP|\M&C

James Joyce / Finnegans Wake
A Symposium

OUR EXAGMINATION
ROUND HIS FACTIFICATION
FOR INCAMINATION
OF WORK IN PROGRESS

Samuel Beckett, Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen,
Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona,
Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy,
Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage,
William Carlos Williams.

with

LETTERS OF PROTEST

G. V. L. Slingsby and Vladimir Dixon.

A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

Copyright by Sylvia Beach 1929
First published in 1929 by Shakespeare and Company, Paris
Published in 1939 by New Directions at Norfolk, Connecticut,
second edition in 1962 as Our Exagminations, etc.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 44-32829

(ISBN: 0-8112-0446-4)

All fights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in
a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no
part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying and recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the Publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First published as New Directions Paperbook 331 in 1972

THIRD PRINTING

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Pages.

Introduction vii

Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce, by Samuel Beckett i

The idea of time in the work of James Joyce, by Marcel Brion. . 23

James Joyce’s Work in Progress and old norse poetry, by Frank

Budgen 3^

Prolegomena to Work in Progress, by Stuart Gilbert 47

The revolution of language and James Joyce, by Eugene Jolas. . 77

I DONT KNOW WHAT TO CALL IT BUT ITS MIGHTY UNLIKE PROSE, by

Victor Llona 93

Mr. Joyce directs an irish word ballet, by Robert McAlmon.. . 103
The catholic element in Work in Progress, by Thomas McGreevy. . 117

Mr. Joyce’s treatment of plot, by Elliot Paul 129

Joyce and his dynamic, by John Rodker 139

Before Ulysses — and after, by Robert Sage 147

A POINT FOR AMERICAN CRITICISM, by William Carlos Williams. . . 171

Writes a common reader, by G. V. L. Slingsby 189

A LITTER TO MR. James JoYCE, by Vladimir Dixon 193

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2017 with funding from
American Printing House for the Blind, Inc.

https://archive.org/details/ourexagminationrOOsamu

INTRODUCTION (1961)

The surviving authors of Our Exagmination have very
kindly asked its former publisher to contribute to the re-issue
of their work a few words about its origin. Many of the essays
included were first published by Eugene Jolas in his review,
transition : what, therefore, could be more fitting than an
introduction by Mrs. Eugene Jolas ? But she has declined the
honour, Mr. Stuart Gilbert has too, so it is left to me to tell
how this little volume came about.

To begin with, I have a confession to make : when given a
piece of Work in Progress to interpret by the author, I failed to
pass my ‘ exagmination ’ : whereas, as will be seen in the twelve
essays in this volume, all these followers of the Work went
around in it with the greatest ease.

‘ Our Exag ’, as at Shakespeare and Company it was called,
is most valuable, indeed indispensable to readers of Finnegans
Wake : they would do well to hear what these writers, friends
and collaborators of Joyce, followers of his new work as it
progressed, have to say on the subject. They had the ad-
vantage of hearing the hints that he would let fall and the
delightful stories he told when in the company of his friends.

Our Exagmination is therefore unique. And it has the added
charm of Joyce’s presence, for Mr. Stuart Gilbert strongly
suspects that Mr. Vladimir Dixon, author of ‘A Litter’, is
James Joyce himself.

Vlll

In 1929, date of publication of Our Exagmination, the future
Finnegans Wake was appearing in transition and its readers
were following it with excitement, though often losing their
way in the dark of this night piece. They needed help : the
articles contributed to transition by writers who had penetrated
deeply into the mysteries of Work in Progress, and other essays
on the subject, were assembled in the volume entitled (by
Joyce) Our Exagmination round His Factification for In-
camination of Work in Progress, and brought out by Shakes-
peare and Company.

Sylvia Beach.

DANTE... BRUNO. VICO.. JOYCE

SAMUEL BECKETT

DANTE... BRUNO. VICO.. JOYCE

Samuel Beckett.

The danger is in the neatness of identifications. The concept-
ion of Philosophy and Philology as a pair of nigger minstrels
outoftheTeatro dei Piccoli is soothing, like the contemplation
of a carefully folded ham-sandwich. Giambattista Vico him-
self could not resist the attractiveness of such coincidence of
gesture. He insisted on complete identification between the
philosophical abstraction and the empirical illustration, there-
by annulling the absolutism of each conception — hoisting
the real unjustifiably clear of its dimensional limits, tempor-
alising that which is extra temporal. And now here am I,
with my handful of abstractions, among which notably : a
mountain, the coincidence of contraries, the inevitability of
cyclic evolution, a system of Poetics, and the prospect of self-
extension in the world of Mr. Joyce’s 'Work in Progress".
There is the temptation to treat every concept like 'a bass
dropt neck fust in till a bung crate’, and make a really tidy job
of it. Unfortunately such an exactitude of application would
imply distortion in one of two directions. Must we wring the
neck ol a certain system in order to stuff it into a contempor-
ary pigeon-hole, or modify the dimensions of that pigeon-

hole for the satisfaction of the analogymongers ? Literary
criticism is not book-keeping.

Giambattista Vico was a practical roundheaded Neapolitan.
It pleases Croce to consider him as a mystic, essentially spec-
ulative, ' disdegnoso delV empirismo\ It is a surprising
interpretation, seeing that more than three-fifths of his Scien^a
Nuova is concerned with empirical investigation. Croce op-
poses him to the reformative materialistic school of Ugo
Grozio, and absolves him from the utilitarian preoccupations
of Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Bayle and Machiavelli. All this
cannot be swallowed without protest. Vico defines Provid-
ence as : ' una mente spesso diversa ed alle volte tutta contra-
ria e sempre superiore ad essi fini particolari che essi uomini
si avevano proposti; dei quali fini ristretti fatti me^\i per ser-
vire a fini piu ampi, gli ha sempre adoperati per conservare
Vumana genera^ione in questa terra \ What could be more
definitely utilitarianism ? His treatment of the origin and
functions of poetry, language and myth, as will appear later,
is as far removed from the mystical as it is possible to im-
agine. For our immediate purpose, however, it matters little
whether we consider him as a mystic or as a scientific inves-
tigator ; but there are ho two ways about considering him as
an innovator. His division of the development of human
society into three ages : Theocratic, Heroic, Human (civil-
ized), with a corresponding classification of language : Hie-
roglyphic (sacred), Metaphorical (poetic). Philosophical (capa-
ble of abstraction and generalisation), was by no means
new, although it must have appeared so to his contempor-
aries. He derived this convenient classification from the
Egyptians, via Herodotus. At the same time it is impossible to
deny the originality with which he applied and developed its

implications. His exposition of the ineluctable circular pro-
gression of Society was completely new, although the germ of
it was contained in Giordano Bruno’s treatment of identified
contraries. But it is in Book 2., described by himself as * tutto
il corpo... la chiave maestra... dell opera\ that appears
the unqualified originality of his mind ; here he evolved
a theory of the origins of poetry and language, the signi-
ficance of myth, and the nature of barbaric civilization that
must have appeared nothing less than an impertinent outrage
against tradition. These two aspects of Vico have their
reverberations, their reapplications — without however, rec-
eiving the faintest explicit illustration — in ‘ Work in Pro-
gress.*

It is first necessary to condense the thesis of Vico, the scient-
ific historian; In the beginning was the thunder : the thun-
der set free Religion, in its most objective and unphilosoph-
ical form — idolatrous animism : Religion produced Society,
and the first social men were the cave-dwellers, taking refuge
from a passionate Nature : this primitive family life receives
its first impulse towards development from the arrival of ter-
rified vagabonds : admitted, they are the first slaves : growing
stronger, they exact agrarian concessions, and a despotism
has evolved into a primitive feudalism : the cave becomes a
city, and the feudal system a democracy : then an anarchy :
this is corrected by a return to monarchy : the last stage is a
tendency towards interdestruction: the nations are dispersed,
and the Phoenix of Society arises out of their ashes. To this
six-termed social progression corresponds a six-termed pro-
gression of human motives : necessity, utility, convenience,
pleasure, luxury, abuse of luxury : and their incarnate man-
ifestations : Polyphemus, Achilles, Caesar and Alexander,
Tiberius, Caligula and Nero. At this point Vico applies

Bruno — though he takes very good care not to say so — and
proceeds from rather arbitrary data to philosophical abstract-
ion. There is no difference, says Bruno between the smal-
lest possible chord and the smallest possible arc, no difference
between the infinite circle and the straight line. The maxima
and minima of particular contraries are one and indifferent.
Minimal heat equals minimal cold. Consequently transmu-
tations are circular. The principle (minimum) of one contrary
takes its movement from the principle (maximum) of another.
Therefore not only do the minima coincide with the minima,
the maxima with the maxima, but the minima with the maxima
in the succession of transmutations. Maximal speed is a
state of rest. The maximum of corruption and the min-
imum of generation are identical: in principle, corruption is
generation. And all things are ultimately identified with
God, the universal monad, Monad of monads. From these
considerations Vico evolved a Science and Philosophy of Hist-
ory, It may be an amusing exercise to take an historical figure,
such as Scipio, and label him No. 3 ; it is of no ultimate impor-
tance. What is of ultimate importance is the recognition that
the passage from Scipio to Caesar is as inevitable as the passage
from Caesar to Tiberius, since the flowers of corruption in Scipio
and Caesar are the seeds of vitality in Caesar and Tiberius.
Thus we have the spectacleof a human progression thatdepends
for its movement on individuals, and which at the same time
is independent of individuals in virtue of what appears to
be a preordained cyclicism. It follows that History is nei-
ther to be considered as a formless structure, due exclusively
to the achievements of individual agents, nor as possessing
reality apart from and independent of them, accomplished
behind their backs in spite of them, the work of some superior
force, variously known as Fate, Chance, Fortune, God. Both

these views, the materialistic and the transcendental, Vico
rejects in favour of the rational. Individuality is the concre-
tion of universality, and every individual action is at the
same time superindividual. The individual and the univer-
sal cannot be considered as distinct from each other. History,
then, is not the result of Fate or Chance — in both cases the
individual would be separated from his product — but the
result of a Necessity that is not Fate, of a Liberty that is not
Chance (compare Dante’s *yoke of liberty’). This force he
called Divine Providence, with his tongue, one feels, very
much in his cheek. And it is to this Providence that we
must trace the three institutions common to every society :
Church, Marriage, Burial. This is not Bossuet’s Providence,
transcendental and miraculous, but immanent and the stuff
itself of human life, working by natural means. Humanity
is its work in itself. God acts on her, but by means of her.
Humanity is divine, but no man is divine. This social and
historical classification is clearly adapted by Mr. Joyce as a
structural convenience or inconvenience. His position is
in no way a philosophical one. It is the detached attitude of
Stephen Dedalus in 'Portrait of the Artist.. ' who describes
Epictetus to the Master of Studies as « an old gentleman
who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water. »
The lamp is more important than the lamp-lighter. By struc-
tural I do not only mean a bold outward division, a bare skel-
eton for the housing of material. I mean the endless substan-
tial variations on these three beats, and interior intertwining
of these three themes into a decoration of arabesques — decor-
ation and more than decoration. Part i. is a mass of past
shadow, corresponding therefore to Vico’s first human insti-
tution, Religion, or to his Theocratic age, or simply to an
abstraction — Birth. Part 2 is the lovegame of the children,

corresponding to the second institution, Marriage, or to the
Heroic age, or to an abstraction — Maturity. Part. 3 . is passed
in sleep, corresponding to the third institution. Burial, or to
the Human age, or to an abstraction — Corruption. Part 4
is the day beginning again, and corresponds to Vico’s Provid-
ence, or to the transition from the Human to the Theocra-
tic, or to an abstraction — Generation. Mr. Joyce does not
take birth for granted, as Vico seems to have done. So much
for the dry bones. The consciousness that there is a great
deal of the unborn infant in the lifeless octogenarian, and a
great deal of both in the man at the apogee of his life’s curve,
removes all the stiff interexclusiveness that is often the dan-
ger in neat construction. Corruption is not excluded from
Part I. nor maturity from Part 3. The four 'lovedroyd cur-
dinals’ are presented on the same plane — 'his element cur-
dinal numen and his enement curdinal marrying and his
epulent curdinal weisswasch and his eminent curdinal
Kay o’ Kay ! ’ There are numerous references to Vico’s
four human institutions — Providence counting as one I *A
good clap, a fore wedding, a bad wake, tell hell’s well’ : ' their
weatherings and their marryings and their buryings and their
natural selections’ : 'the lightning look, the birding cry, awe
from the grave, everflowing on our times’ : 'by four hands of
forethought the first babe of reconcilement is laid in its last
cradle of hume sweet hume’.

Apart from this emphasis on the tangible conveniences com-
mon to Humanity, we find frequent expressions of Vico’s insis-
tence on the inevitable character of every progression —or retro-
gression : 'The Vico road goes round and round to meet where
terms begin. Still onappealed to by the cycles and onappal-
led by the recoursers, we feel all serene, never you fret, as
regards our dutyful cask.... before there was a man at all in

Ireland there was a lord at Lucan. We only wish everyone
was as sure of anything in this watery world as we are of

everything in the newlywet fellow that‘s bound to follow ’

'The efferfreshpainted livy inbeautific repose upon the silence
of the dead from Pharoph the next first down to rameschec-
kles the last bust thing’. 'In fact, under the close eyes of the
inspectors the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their
contrarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody similarly as
by the providential warring of heartshaker with housebrea-
ker and of dramdrinker against freethinker our social some-
thing bowls along bumpily, experiencing a jolting series of
prearranged disappointments, down the long lane of (it’s as
semper asoxhousehumper) generations, more generations and
still more generations’ — this last a case of Mr. Joyce’s rare
subjectivism. In a word, here is all humanity circling with
fatal monotony about the Providential fulcrum — the 'convoy
wheeling encirculing abound the gigantig’s lifetree’. Enough
has been said, or at least enough has been suggested, to show
how Vico is substantially present in the Work in Progress.
Passing to the Vico of the Poetics we hope to establish an
even more striking, if less direct, relationship.

Vico rejected the three popular interpretations of the poetic
spirit, which considered poetry as either an ingenious popular
expression of philosophical conceptions, or an amusing social
diversion, or an exact science within the reach of everyone in
possession of the recipe. Poetry, he says, was born of curio-
sity, daughter of ignorance. The first men had to create
matter by the force of their imagination, and 'poet’ means
'creator’. Poetry was the first operation of the human mind,
and without it thought could not exist. Barbarians, incap-
able of analysis and abstraction, must use their fantasy to
explain what their reason cannot comprehend. Before artic-

ulation comes song ; before abstract terms, metaphors. The
figurative character of the oldest poetry must be regarded, not
as sophisticated confectionery, but as evidence of a poverty-
stricken vocabulary and of a disability to achieve abstraction.
Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics : Metaphy-
sics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disem-
bodiment of the spiritual ; Poetry is all passion and feeling
and animates the inanimate ; Metaphysics are most perfect
when most concerned with universals ; Poetry, when
most concerned with particulars. Poets are the sense, philos-
ophers the intelligence of humanity. Considering the Schol-
astics’ axiom : "niente e neirintelleto che prima non sia nel
senso\ it follows that poetry is a prime condition of philoso-
phy and civilization. The primitive animistic movement
was a manifestation of the ^ forma poetica dello spirito.'

His treatment of the origin of language proceeds rJong
similar lines. Here again he rejected the materialistic and
transcendental views : the one declaring that language was
nothing but a polite and conventional symbolism ; the other,
in desperation, describing it as a gift from the Gods. As
before, Vico is the rationalist, aware of the natural and inevit-
able growth of language. In its first dumb form, language
was gesture. If a man wanted to say ‘sea’, he pointed to the
sea. With the spread of animism this gesture was replaced
by the word : 'Neptune’. He directs our attention to the fact
that every need of life, natural, moral and economic, has its
verbal expression in one or other of the 30000 Greek divini-
ties. This is Homer’s 'language of the Gods’. Its Evolution
through poetry to a highly civilized vehicle, rich in abstract
and technical terms, was as little fortuitous as the evolution
of society itself. Words have their progressions as well as
social phases. 'Forest-cabin-village-city-academy’ is one rough

progression. Another : ’mountain*plain-riverbank’. And
every word expands with psychological inevitability. Take
the Latin word : ‘Lex’.

1. Lex

2. Ilex

3 . Legere

4. Aquilex

5. Lex

6. Lex

7. Legere

= Crop of acorns.

= Tree that produces acorns.

= To gather.

— He that gathers the waters.

= Gathering together of peoples, public
assembly.

= Law.

= To gather together letters into a word,
to read.

The root of any word whatsoever can be traced back to
some pre-lingual symbol. This early inability to abstract
the general from the particular produced the Type-names. It
is the child’s mind over again. The child extends the names
of the first familiar objects to other strange objects in which
he is conscious of some analogy. The first men, unable to
conceive the abstract idea of ‘poet’ or ‘hero’, named every
hero after the first hero, every poet after the first poet. Recog-
nizing this custom of designating a number of individuals
by the names of their prototypes, we can explain various clas-
sical and mythological mysteries. Hermes is the prototype
of the Egyptian inventor : so for Romulus, the great law-giver,
and Hercules, the Greek hero : so for Homer. Thus Vico
asserts the spontaneity of language and denies the dualism of
poetry and language. Similarly, poetry is the foundation of
writing. When language consisted of gesture, the spoken and
the written were identical. Hieroglyphics, or sacred lan-
guage, as he calls it, were not the invention of philosophers
for the mysterious expression of profound thought, but the

common necessity of primitive peoples. Convenience only
begins to assert itself at a far more advanced stage of civiliz-
ation, in the form of alphabetism. Here Vico, implicitly at
least, distinguishes between writing and direct expression.
In such direct expression, form and content are inseparable.
Examples are the medals of the Middle Ages, which bore no
inscription and were a mute testimony to the feebleness of
conventional alphabetic writing : and the flags of our own
day. As with Poetry and Language, so with Myth. Myth,
according to Vico, is neither an allegorical expression of gen-
eral philosophical axioms (Conti, Bacon), nor a derivative
from particular peoples, as for instance the Hebrews or Egyp-
tians, nor yet the work of isolated poets, but an historical state-
ment of fact, of actual contemporary phenomena, actual in
the sense that they were created out of necessity by primitive
minds, and firmly believed. Allegory implies a threefold
intellectual operation : the construction of a message of gen-
eral significance, the preparation of a fabulous form, and an
exercise of considerable technical difficulty in uniting the two,
an operation totally beyond the reach of the primitive mind.
Moreover, if we consider the myth as being essentially alleg-
orical, we are not obliged to acceptthe form in which itiscast
as a statement of fact. But we know that the actual creators
of these myths gave full credence to their face-value. Jove
was no symbol : he was terribly real. It was precisely their
superficial metaphorical character that made them intelligible
to people incapable of receiving anything more abstract than
the plain record of objectivity.

Such is a painful exposition of Vico’s dynamic treatment
of Language, Poetry and Myth. He may still appear as a
mystic to some : if so, a mystic that rejects the transcendental
in every shape and form as a factor in human development,

and whose Providence is not divine enough to do without
the cooperation of Humanity.

On turning to the * Work in Progress ’ we find that the mir-
ror is not so convex. Here is direct expression — pages and
pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and
Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it.
You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from
content that you can comprehend the one almost without
bothering to read the other. This rapid skimming and absorp-
tion of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what
I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual saliva-
tion. The form that is an arbitrary and independent pheno-
menon can fulfil no higher function than that of stimulus for
a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling compre-
hension. When Miss Rebecca West clears her decks for a
sorrowful deprecation of the Narcisstic element in Mr. Joyce
by the purchase of 3 hats, one feels that she might very well
wear her bib at all her intellectual banquets, or alternatively,
assert a more noteworthy control over her salivary glands than
is possible for Monsieur Pavlo’s unfortunate dogs. The title of
this book is a good example of a form carrying a strict inner
determination. It should be proof against the usual volley of
cerebral sniggers : and it may suggest to some a dozen incred-
ulous Joshuas prowling aroud the Queen’s Hall, springing
their tuning-forks lightly against finger-nails that have not yet
been refined out of existence. Mr. Joyce has a word to say to
you on the subject : * Yet to concentrate solely on the literal
sense or even the psychological content of any document to
the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circums-
tantiating it is just as harmful ; etc.’ And another : ‘Who in
his hearts doubts either that the facts of feminine clothie-
ring are there all the time or that the feminine fiction.

stranger than the facts, is there also at the same time, only
a little to the rere ? Or that one may be separated from
the orther ? Or that both may be contemplated simul-
taneously ? Or that each may be taken up in turn and consid-
ered apart from the other?’

Here form is content, content is form. You complain that
this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all.
It is not to be read — or rather it is not only to be read. It
is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about
something; it is that something itself. (A fact that has been
grasped by an eminent English novelist and historian whose
work is in complete opposition to Mr Joyce ’s). When the
sense is sleep, the words go to sleep. (See the end of ^Anna
Livid!') When the sense is dancing, the words dance. Take
the passage at the end of Shaun’s pastoral : To stirr up love’s
young fizz I tilt with this bridle’s cup champagne, dimming
douce from her peepair of hideseeks tight squeezed on my
snowybreasted and while my pearlies in their sparkling
wisdom are nippling her bubblets I swear (and let you
swear) by the bumper round of my poor old snaggletooth‘s
solidbowel I ne’er will prove I’m untrue to (theare !) you liking
so long as my hole looks. Down.’ The language is drunk.
The very words are tilted and effervescent. How can we
qualify this general esthetic vigilance without which we
cannot hope to snare the sense which is for ever rising to
the surface of the form and becoming the form itself? St. Aug-
ustine puts us on the track of a word with his 'inten-
derd\ Dante has : "Donne cdavete intelletto d'amord, and

Voi che, intendendo, il ter^o del movete ’ ; but his ' inten-
dere' suggests a strictly intellectual operation. When an
Italian says to-day * Ho inteso, ’ he means something be-
tween ' Ho udito ’ and ' Ho capita ’, a sensuous untidy art of

intellection. Perhaps * apprehension ’ is the most satisfac-
tory English word. Stephen says to Lynch : ' Temporal or
spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as
selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable back-
ground of space or time which is not it You apprehend

its wholeness. ’ There is one point to make clear : the Beauty
of ' Work in Progress ’ is not presented in space alone, since
its adequate apprehension depends as much on its visibility as
on its audibility. There is a temporal as well as a spatial unity
to be apprehended. Substitute ' and ’ for ' or ’ in the quota-
tion, and it becomes obvious why it is as inadequate to speak
fo ' reading ’ ' Work in Progress ’ as it would be extrava-
gant to speak of ' apprehending’ the work of the late Mr. Nat
Gould. Mr. Joyce has desophisticated language. And it is
worth while remarking that no language is so sophisticated
as English. It is abstracted to death. Take the word ‘ doubt ’ :
it gives us hardly any sensuous suggestion of hesitancy, of the
necessity for choice, of static irresolution. Whereas the Ger-
man ‘ Zweifel ’ does, and, in lesser degree, the Italian * dubi-
tare ’. Mr. Joyce recognises how inadequate ' doubt ’ is to
express a state of extreme uncertainty, and replaces it by ‘ in
twosome twiminds’. Nor is he by any means the first to
recognize the importance of treating words as something more
than mere polite symbols. Shakespeare uses fat, greasy
words to express corruption : * Duller shouldst thou be than
the fat weed that rots itself in death on Lethe wharf’. We
hear the ooze squelching all through Dickens’s description of
the Thames in ‘ Great Expectations ’. This writing that you
find so obscure is a quintessential extraction of language and
painting and gesture, .with all the inevitable clarity of the
old inarticulation. Here is the savage economy of hiero-
glyphics. Here words are not the polite contortions of 20th

century printer’s ink. They are alive. They elbow their
way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disap-
pear. ' Brawn is my name and broad is my nature and I ' ve
breit on my brow and all's right with every feature and I’ll
brune this bird or Brown Bess’s bung ’ s gone bandy ’. This
is Brawn blowing with a light gust through the trees or
Brawn passing with the sunset. Because the wind in the
trees means as little to you as the evening prospect from the
Piazzale Michelangiolo — though you accept them both
because your non-acceptance would be of no significance,
this little adventure of Brawn means nothing to you — and
you do not accept it, even though here also your non-accep-
tance is of no significance. H. C. Earwigger, too, is not
content to be mentioned like a shilling-shocker villain, and
then dropped until the exigencies of the narrative require
that he be again referred to. He continues to suggest himself
for a couple of pages, by means of repeated permutations on
his * normative letters ’, as if to say : ' This is all about me,
H. C. Earwigger : don’t forget this is all about me ! ’ This
inner elemental vitality and corruption of expression imparts
a furious restlessness to the form, which is admirably suited
to the purgatorial aspect of the work. There is an endless
verbal germination, maturation, putrefaction, the cyclic dyn-
amism of the intermediate. This reduction of various express-
ive media to their primitive economic directness, and the
fusion of these primal essences into an assimilated medium
for the exteriorisation of thought, is pure Vico, and Vico,
applied to the problem of style. But Vico is reflected more
explicitly than by a distillation of disparate poetic ingredients
into a synthetical syrup. We notice that there is little or no
attempt at subjectivism or abstraction, no attempt at meta-
physical generalisation. We are presented with a statement

of the particular. It is the old myth : the girl on the dirt
track, the two washerwomen on th^ banks of the river. And
there is considerable animism : the mountain * abhearing’, the
river puffing her old doudheen. (See the beautiful passage
beginning : * First she let her hair fall and down it fiussed ’.)
We have Type-names : Isolde — any beautiful girl : Earwig-
gcr — Guinness’s Brewery, the Wellington monument, the
Phoenix Park, anything that occupies an extremely comfort-
able position between the two stools. Anna Livia herself, mo-
ther of Dublin, but no more the only mother than Zoroaster
was the only oriental stargazer. ' Teems of times and happy
returns. The same anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna
was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be. Northmen’s thing made
Southfolk’s place, but howmultyplurators made eachone in
person. ” Basta I Vico and Bruno are here, and more sub-
stantially than would appear from this swift survey of the
question. For the benefit of those who enjoy a parenthetical
sneer, we would draw attention to the fact that when Mr. Joyce’s
early pamphlet ' ' The Day of Rabblemeni ” appeared, the local
philosophers were thrown into a state of some bewilderment
by a reference in the first line to ‘ * The Nolan. ” They finally
succeeded in identifying this mysterious individual with one
of the obscurer ancient Irish kings. In the present work he
appears frequently as “Browne & Nolan ’’the name of a
very remarkable Dublin Bookseller and Stationer.

To justify our title, we must move North, ‘ Soprani bel fume
d Arno alia gran villa ’... Between * colui per lo cut verso —
il meonio cantor non e pin solo ’and the “still to-day insuffi-
ciently malestimated notesnatcher, Shem the Penman”, there
exists considerable circumstantial similarity. They both saw
how worn out and threadbare was the conventional language
of cunning literary artificers, both rejected an approximation

to a universal language. If English is not yet so definitely a
polite necessity as Latin was in the Middle Ages, at least one
is justified in declaring that its position in relation to other
European languages is to a great extent that of mediaeval
Latin to the Italian dialects. Dante did not adopt the vulgar
out of any kind of local jingoism nor out of any determination
to assert the superiority of Tuscan to all its rivals as a form
of spoken Italian. On reading his ‘ De Vulgari Eloquentia'
we are struck by his complete freedom from civic intolerance.
He attacks the world’s Portadownians : ' Narn quicumque tarn
obscenae rationis est, ut locum suae nationis delitosissimm
credat esse sub sole, huic etiam prce cunctis propriam volgare
licetur, idestmaternam locutionem. Nos autem, cui mundus
est patria... etc. ’ When he comes to examine the dial-
ects he finds Tuscan: ' iurpissimum fere omnes Tusci

in suo turpiloquio obtusi non restat in dubio quin

aliud sit vulgare quod quaerimus quam quod attingit popu-
lus Tuscanorum. ’ His conclusion is that the corruption
common to all the dialects makes it impossible to select one
rather than another as an adequate literary form, and that he
who would write in the vulgar must assemble the purest
elements from each dialect and construct a synthetic language
that would at least possess more than a circumscribed local
interest : which is precisely what he did. He did not write in
Florentine any more than in Neapolitan. He wrote a vulgar
that cow/i/ have been spoken by an ideal Italian who had assim-
ilated what was best in all the dialects of his country, but
which in fact was certainly not spoken nor ever had been.
Which disposes of the capital objection that might be made
against this attractive parallel between Dante and Mr. Joyce in
the question of language, i. e. that at least Dante wrote what
was being spoken in the streets of his own town, whereas no

creature in heaven or earth ever spoke the language of "Work
in Progress' It is reasonable to admit that an international
phenomenon might be capable of speaking it, just as in
1 300 none but an inter-regional phenomenon could have
spoken the language of the Divine Comedy. We are incli-
ned to forget that Dante’s literary public was Latin, that the
form of his Poem was to be judged by Latin eyes and ears,
by a Latin Esthetic intolerant of innovation, and which could
hardly fail to be irritated by the substitution of * Nel me^^o
del cammin di nostra vita ’ with its * barbarous ’ directness
for the suave elegance of : * Ultima regna canam, Jluido conier-
mina mundo^ ’ just as English eyes and ears prefer : * Smok-
ing his favourite pipe in the sacred presence of ladies ’ to :

' Ranking his flavourite turfco in the smukking precincts of
lydias. ’ Boccaccio did not jeer at the * piedi sos^^i ’ of the
peacock that Signora Alighieri dreamed about.

1 find two well made caps in the ' Convivio^y one to fit the
collective noodle of the monodialectical arcadians whose fury
is precipitated by a failure to discover innocefree ” in the
Concise Oxford Dictionary and who qualify as the ' ravings
of a Bedlamite ’ the formal structure raised by Mr. Joyce after
years of patient and inspired labour : * Questi sono da chia-
mare pecore e non uomini ; che se una pecora si gittasse da
una ripa di milk passi, tutte Paltre le andrebbono dietro ; e
se una pecora per alcuna cagione al passare d'una strada salta,
tutte le altre saltano, e\iando nulla veggendo da saltare. E
io ne vidi gid molte in un po\^o saltare, per una che dentro
vi saltOy forse credendo di saltare un muro\ And the other
for Mr. Joyce, biologist in words : ' Questo (formal innovat-
ion) sard luce nuova, sole nuovo, il quale sorgerd ore Fusato
tramonterd e dard luce a coloro che sono in tenebre e in oscu-
ritd per lo usato sole che a loro non luce. ’ And, lest he should

pull it down over his eyes and laugh behind the peak, I trans-
late * in tenebre e in oscuritd ’ by ‘ bored to extinction. ’
(Dante makes a curious mistake speaking of the origin of
language, when he rejects the authority of Genesis that Eve
was the first to speak, when she addressed the Serpent. His
incredulity is amusing : ' inconvenienter putatur tarn egre-
gium humani genei'is actum, vel prius quam a viro, foemina
profluisse. ’ But before Eve was born, * the animals were
given names by Adam, the man who * first said goo to a
goose ’. Moreover it is explicitly stated that the choice of na-
mes was left entirely to Adam, so that there is not the slight-
est Biblical authority for the conception of language as a
direct gift of God, any more than there is any intellectual
authority for conceiving that we are indebted for the ' Concert’
to the individual who used to buy paint for Giorgione).

We know very little about the immediate reception accor-
ded to Dante’s mighty vindication of the ' vulgar ’, but we
can form our own opinions when, two centuries later, we find
Castiglione splitting more than a few hairs concerning the
respective advantages of Latin and Italian, and Pol-
iziano writing the dullest of dull Latin Elegies to justify his
existence as the author of ' Orfeo ’ and the ' Stance ’. We
may also compare, if we think it worth while, the storm of
ecclesiastical abuse raised by Mr. Joyce’s work, and the treat-
ment that the Divine Comedy must certainly have received
from the same source. His Contemporary Holiness might
have swallowed the crucifixion of * lo sommo Giope ’, and all
it stood for, but he could scarcely have looked with favour on
the spectacle of three of his immediate predecessors plunged
head-foremost in the fiery stone of Malebolge, nor yet the
identification of the Papacy in the mystical procession of Ter-
restial Paradise with a * puttana sciolta ’. The ' De Monar-

chia ’ was burnt publicly under Pope Giovanni XXII at
the instigation of Cardinal Beltrando and the bones of its
author would have suffered the same fate but for the
interference of an influential man of letters, Pino della Tosa.
Another point of comparison is the preoccupation with the
significance of numbers. The death of Beatrice inspired no-
thing less than a highly complicated poem dealing with the
importance of the number 3. in her life. Dante never ceased
to be obsessed by this number. Thus the Poem is divided
into three Cantiche, each composed of 3 3 Canti, and written
in terza rima. Why, Mr. Joyce seems to say, should there
be four legs to a table, and four to a horse, and four seasons
and four Gospels and four Provinces in Ireland ? Why twel-
ve Tables of the Law, and twelve Apostles and twelve months
and twelve Napoleonic marshals and twelve men in Florence
called Ottolenghi ? Why should the Armistice be celebrated
at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh
month ? He cannot tell you because he is not God Almighty,
but in a thousand years he will tell you, and in the meantime
must be content to know why horses have not five legs, nor
three. He is conscious that things with a common numer-
ical characteristic tend towards a very significant interrelation-
ship. This preoccupation is freely translated in his present
work : see the * Question and Answer ’ chapter, and the Four
speaking through the child’s brain. They are the four winds
as much as the four Provinces, and the four Episcopal Sees
as much as either.

A last word about the Purgatories. Dante’s is conical and
consequently implies culmination. Mr. Joyce’s is spherical
and excludes culmination. In the one there is an ascent
from real vegetation — Ante-Purgatory, to ideal vegetation —
Terrestial Paradise : in the other there is no ascent and no

ideal vegetation. In the one, absolute progression and a
guaranteed consummation : in the other, flux — progression
or retrogression, and an apparent consummation. In the one
movement is unidirectional, and a step forward represents a
net advance : in the other movement is non-directional —
or multi-directional, and a step forward is, by definition, a
step back. Dante’s Terrestial Paradise is the carriage entrance
to a Paradise that is not terrestial : Mr. Joyce’s Terrestial Para-
dise is the tradesmen’s entrance on to the sea-shore. Sin is an
impediment to movement up the cone, and a condition of
movementround the sphere. In what sense, then, is Mr. Joy-
ce’s work purgatorial ? In the absolute absence of the Absol-
ute. Hell is the static lifelessness of unrelieved viciousness.
Paradise the static lifelessness of unrelieved immaculation.
Purgatory a flood of movement and vitality released by
the conjunction of these two elements. There is a conti-
nuous purgatorial process at work, in the sense that the
vicious circle of humanity is being achieved, and this achieve-
ment depends on the recurrent predomination of one of two
broad qualities. No resistance, no eruption, and it is only in
Hell and Paradise that there are no eruptions, that there can
be none, need be none. On this earth that is Purgatory, Vice
and Virtue — which you may take to mean any pair of large
contrary human factors — must in turn be purged down to
spirits of rebelliousness. Then the dominant crust of the
Vicious or Virtuous sets, resistance is provided, the explosion
duly takes place and the machine proceeds. And no more
than this ; neither prize nor penalty ; simply a series of stim-
ulants to enable the kitten to catch its tail. And the par-
tially purgatorial agent? The partially purged.

THE IDEA OF TIME IN THE WORK
OF JAMES JOYCE

MARCEL BRION

THE IDEA OF TIME
IN THE WORK OF JAMES JOYCE

Marcel Brion.

Certain thinkers have at times wondered if the essential
difference existing between man and God were not a difference
of time. Space is not concerned here — God is everywhere
— but, rather, this much more complex dimension which is
generally inaccessible to human science. -We measure time
but we do not know what it is.

We often encounter in mystical literature the story of the
monk or poet who has fallen asleep in the forest. When he
awakes he no longer recognizes either men or the countryside.
His meditation or slumber, which to him has appeared very
short, has in reality lasted hundreds of years. But during
this moment in which he has been snatched from the tyranny
of time he has caught a glimpse of the mysterious aspects of
infinity, he has neared the laws of the Cosmos, the throne of
God.

Theoretically, the difference in speed between two objects
in motion is sufficient to make them imperceptible to each
other ; to destroy, practically, their existence.

The relations between human beings are those of time.

All men are made similar by the nearly equal cadence of their
heart-beats, but they are separated by the rhythms of their
sensations or their thoughts. Only those walking at the same
pace know each other.

The fourth dimension is actually the only one that matters.
Space is nothing — it is reduced every day by mechanical
means of communication — but consider two men seated side
by side. They do not live in the same time. There is no
possible communication between them. And it is often the
tragedy of life to feel oneself only a few centimeters away
from the beings among whom one lives, yet separated from
them by all the infinity of time.

Time is not an abstract concept. On the contrary, it is
perhaps the only reality in the world, the thing which is the
most concrete. All the rest could only intervene in the form
of its emanations.

We may deduce from this that time is the essential factor
in a work of art. (This appears quite evident when consid-
ered in one if its aspects — rhythm). It is the law of archi-
tecture and of painting. The painters who have attained the
greatest emotional power are precisely those whose work
includes time — for example, Rembrandt. While we look at
it, the picture seems always in the process of“ being made”.
It seems to be constructing itself with the moments and it
seems that if we were to return on the morrow we should
find it changed. And, in fact, when we return on the mor-
row, it is changed. There are likewise masterpieces of sculpture
which give the impression of a continual palpitation, of an
uninterrupted succession of imperceptible movements. It is
this that is ordinarily called life — but life is the consciousness
of time.

A book’s story may embrace several decades, several centu-

ries without revealing time to us. Another imposes it in a
brief moment. There are flat books and deep books (without
metaphor and almost in a material sense) ; there are also
books rich with time and books destitute of time. This is the
reason that one of the greatest writers of our period, one of
the most sensitive and most intuitive, made of time the essen-
tial dimension of his work — temps perdu and tetnps
retrouve.

Marcel’s Proust’s idea of time is extremely curious. In his
books time is a character like the others — I might even say
more than the others. Time is at the centre of his work like
a sort of lighthouse with turning signals. The men who
revolve around this luminous mass are suddenly illuminated
by the beams of the projector in periodic flashes, and the
moment the light abandons them they fall back into obscurity,
nothingness.

It is in time that the characters of Proust become conscious
of themselves. They seek themselves in it and are reflected
in it. They complete their metamorphosis in it. But time
remains exterior to them. They are not incorporated in it
any more than they integrate it in themselves. They submit
to it, as to gravity or the law of acceleration. But the author
has conceived it so intensely that we feel this time to be mat-
erialized often like an object, applied like a thin and trans-
parent pellicle on the face of men.

Perhaps because illness sheltered him from the customary
rhythm of life, because it imposed upon him a different order
of sensations, Proust understood time as a thing in itself, time
which does not ordinarily separate us from our act and which
we make simply a condition, an accessory of our existence.

With James Joyce it is another thing. I place James Joyce
and Marcel Proust together intentionally because in my opi-

nion they are the two greatest writers of our century, the only
ones who have brought an original vision of the world to our
epoch, who have renewed equally the universe of sensations
and of ideas. The work of Proust and that of Joyce are the
only ones between which a parallel may be drawn on an ideal
plane of quality — and this for reasons which go far beyond
questions of technique or talent — in the domain of literature
and art. Perhaps it is because a sort of pure instinct of genius
is likewise found here under a very elaborate art ; but, above
all, it is because with Joyce as with Proust time is a dominant
factor.

On the absolute plane, the life of the ephemera and that of
the animal endowed with the greatest length of life are equal.
In the one case as in the other it is a life, and the fact that it
stretches out for a few seconds or a few centuries has no im-
portance. It is probable that both will be divided into a like
number of units but that the unit will belong for the one
and extremely short for the other. The idea of time being
essentially that of the dissociation of moments, a hundredth
of a second for an insect that lives for some minutes will be
loaded with as many experiences as a year for the long-living
animal. It it the same thing, all proportions retained, with
men — some live at high speed, others at reduced speed ; and
they are separated, inexorably most often, by these different
cadences.

We may thus account for the fact that eighteen hours of
Bloom’s life should give birth to Ulysses, and we can easily
imagine that Ufysses might have been ten times as long, a hun-
dred times as long, extended to infinity, that one of Bloom’s
minutes might have filled a library. This is the mystery of
the relativity of time.

If time remains external to Proust, if he gives it an exist-

ence apart, isolated from his characters, for Joyce, on the
contrary, it remains the inseparable factor, the primary elem-
ent at the base of his work.

This is why he creates his own time, as he creates his voc-
abulary and his characters. He soon elaborates what he
receives from reality by a mysterious chemistry into new
elements bearing the marks of this personality. But even as
he metamorphoses the countryside, the streets of Dublin, the
beach, the monuments, he mixes all this into what appears
to us at first sight as a chaos. This chaos is the condition
necessary to all creation. The cards are shuffled to begin a
new game and all the elements of a universe are mingled
before a new world is made, in order that new forms may be
given birth. A total refutation of man and his milieu, a
rejection of combinations already used, a need of fine new
instruments. Joyce dashes the scenes of the world down
pellmell to find an unhackneyed meaning and a law that is
not outdated in the arrangement he is afterward to give them.
To do this it is fitting that he should at the outset break
through the too-narrow restraints of time and space ; he must
have an individual conception of these dimensions and adopt
them to the necessities of his creation. In Ulysses, and still
more in Work in Progress, we seem to be present at the
birth of a world. In this apparent chaos we are conscious
of a creative purpose, constructive and architectural, which
has razed every conventional dimension, concept and voca-
bulary, and selected from their scattered material the elements
of a new structure. Joyce has created his language, either
by writing words phonetically — and Heaven knows such a
method is enough to discipline English — or by introducing
foreign words and dialect forms, or finally by the wholesale
manufacture of words which he requires and which are not

to be had at second hand. And it is all done with an unpre-
cedented creative power, with an almost unique fertility of
imagination, inexhaustibly reinforced by the incredible extent
of his culture. In the field of verbal richness Joyce has
annexed the seemingly impregnable position of Rabelais ; but
whereas in Rabelais, form was under no direction other
than that of an amused fantasy, in Joyce it is the handmaid
of a philosophy. Work in Progress seems to be based on the
historical theory of Vico an actual recreation of the world,
its ideas and its forms.

Mr. Elliot Paul well demonstrated recently how Joyce in
his composition of Work in Progress revealed an entirely
individual conception of time and space.

This was already quite apparent in his first books. The
stories in Dubliners, for example, seem entirely filled with the
beating of a silent metronome. They unfold themselves in
" time ”. Properly speaking, Araby is a drama of time, a
drama ot lost time ; and we feel that each of the characters in
Dubliners is rich or poor with his time, that the vibration of
his life is hasty or slow.

In Ulysses the phenomenon is even more evident. To
reduce the decades of the Iliad, the Odyssey, of Telemachus
to eighteen hours in the life of a man — and of an ordinary
man to whom nothing happens save the most ordinary events
of existence — is one of the Einsteinian miracles of the rela-
tivity of time. And we understand it even better when we see
the movement of the vibrations transformed in each chapter,
changing rhythm and tempo, slowing up in the Nausicaa
episode, blowing like the wind in that of Eolus, giving spa-
cious and deep cadences to the gynecological discussion.
The chapter most powerfully demonstrating Joyce’s mastery
in expressing time is perhaps that in which Marian Bloom’s

revery unrolls its rapid uninterrupted chain of ideas, memo-
ries and sensations, contrasting to her calm regular breathing.

Better than anyone else, Joyce has restored the sense of
biological and intellectual rhythm. I imagine that he could
write an unprecedented book composed of the simple interior
physical existence, of a man, without anecdotes, without super-
numeraries, with only the circulation of the blood and the
lymph, the race of nervous excitations toward the centres, the
twisting of emotion and thought through the cells. I imagine
that Joyce could compose a book of pure time.

It sometimes seems that a page of Joyce is a strange vibra-
tion of cells, a swarming of the lowest Brownian movements
under the lens of the microscope. In my opinion, if the recent
books of Joyce are considered hermetic by the majority of
readers it is because of the difficulty which the latter exper-
ience in falling into step, in adapting themselves to the rhythm
of each page, in changing ' ' time ” abruptly and as often as
this is necessary.

But still more than to Ulysses these remarks apply to the
book which transition is publishing and of which we as yet
know only a part. Work in Progress is essentially a time
work. From a bird’s eye view, time appears to be its prin-
cipal subject. It begins in the middle of a moment and of a
sentence, as if to place in infinity the initial disturbance of its
waves. The concept of time here plays the principal role,
not only by its concrete expressions but likewise by its abstract
essence. It here takes on the significance of a creator-word
and determines all the movements of the work.

The chronology of the story matters little to the author of
Work in Progress. By his caprice, which in reality obeys a
carefully studied and realized constructive will, characters
most widely separated in time find themselves unexpectedly

cast side by side ; and, as for example Mr. Elliot Paul recently
wrote in transition, " Noah, Premier Gladstone and ' Papa ’
Browning are telescoped into one This image is perfectly
accurate, and the optics of the work are so much the less acces-
sible to the average reader as he does not always distinguish
the moment in which the present episode is placed. When
we are made to pass, without any transition other than an
extremely subtle association of ideas, from Original Sin to the
Wellington Monument and when we are transported from the
Garden of Eden to the Waterloo battlefield we have the im-
pression of crossing a quantity of intermediary planes at full
speed. Sometimes it even seems that the planes exist simul-
taneously in the same place and are multipled like so many
"over-impressions"’. These planes, which are separated,
become remote and are suddenly reunited and sometimes
evoke a sort of accordeon where they are fitted exactly, one
into another like the parts of a telescope, to return to Mr. Elliot
Paul’s metaphor.

This gift of ubiquity permits Joyce to unite persons and
moments which appear to be the most widely separated. It
gives a strange transparence to his scenes, since we perceive
their principal element across four or five various evocations,
all corresponding to the same idea but presenting varied faces
in different lightings and movements.

It has often been said that a man going away from the earth
at the speed of light would by this act relive in an extraor-
dinarily short time all the events in the world’s history.
Supposing this speed were still greater and near to Infinity —
all these events would flash out simultaneously. This is what
happens sometimes in Joyce. Without apparent transition,
the Fall of the Angels is transparently drawn over the Battle
of Waterloo. This appears to us as contrary neither to the

laws of logic nor to those of nature, for these " bridges ” are
joined with a marvellous sense of the association of ideas.
New associations, created by him with amazing refinement,
they cooperate in creating this universe, the Joycian world,
which obeys its own laws and appears to be liberated from
the customary physical restraints.

And we have, indeed, the impression of a very individual
world, very different from our own, a world of reflections that
are sometimes deformed, as in concave or convex mirrors, and
imprinted with a reality true and whole in itself. I do not
speak here only of the vocabulary which Joyce employs and
which he transforms for his usage — which, one might, say,
he creates — but especially of his manners of treating time
and space. It is for this reason, much more than because of
the work’s linguistic difficulties, that the reader often loses
his footing. This is related to the prodigious quantity of
intentions and suggestions which the author accumulates in
each sentence. The sentence only takes on its genuine sense
at the moment that one has discovered its explanatory rap-
prochements or has situated it in time.

And if the books of Joyce are as difficult for many to read
as those of Einstein it is perhaps because both of these men
have discovered a new aspect of the world and one which
cannot be comprehended without a veritable initiation.

Translated from the French
by Robert Sage.

JAMES JOYCE’S WORK IN PROGRESS
AND OLD NORSE POETRY

FRANK BUDGEN

JAMES JOYCE’S WORK IN PROGRESS AND
OLD NORSE POETRY

Frank Budgen.

Joyce is not to be described by an etiquette or located with-
in the four walls of any aesthetic creed. His logic is that of
life and his inventions are organic necessities. His present
work therefore, it seems to me, is best understood by what
has preceded it, his own in the first place and then its kin-
dred among past productions.

His mediaeval Catholic affinities have been often indicated
but while not denying the catholic-Irish element in Joyce —
its universality and its passionate localism — I think I can
see a kinship, equally authentic, with heathen Scandinavia.
The whole of Joyce’s work has been hitherto one long cele-
bration of the princij^al city of the Ostmen. (If tomorrow
Dublin were spirited away it could be reconstructed out of
“ Ulysses ”). His genius is theirs — adventurous, secular,
and logical.

In the Edda we find the same sense of continuous creation
as in Joyce’s Work in Progress. The world and the Gods
were doomed but phoenix like they were to rise again. The
Sun bore a daughter before the Wolf swallowed her. Vidor
and Vali found on the grass the golden tables of the stricken

gods and Thor’s hammer fell into the mighty hands of his
two sons. Joyce writes : “ The oaks of aid now they lie in
peat yet elms leap where ashes lay. Phall if you but will,
rise you must : and none so soon either shall the pharce for
the nunce come to a set down secular phoenish. ”

Joyce is at present reconquering and extending a poetic
freedom partly usurped by the working intelligence. Human
speech has always had two functions. It seems expedient
that a number of men building a tower shall attach fixed mean-
ings and logical relationships to the words they use but
when not actually working, the words become as free as their
users and are as able and willing to lay aside their union
cards doff their overalls and dance. In Work in Progress
they are dancing new figures to a new tune. The Norse poet
also was alive to the immense emotional force of indirect and
allusive speech as a principle of leverage applied to the ima-
gination. He called a Spade a Spade and a Ship a Ship when
he was using the one or the other. But as a poet he loaded
his song with Kennings so that the image of the thing besung
might appear with new life out of the multicoloured mosaic
of its attributes and associations.

The language and thought of Europe have since been enrich-
ed with ten centuries of cultural effort. Technical progress
has brought the sundered tribes of Europe nearer together.
Their interests interlock and their thought and speech inter-
penetrate in spite of wars and customs barriers. Joyce’s
material is therefore infinitely richer and more varied. He
has at his disposal all the legends not only of his own tribe
but of all the human race, and he is surrounded by a
social organisation immeasurably vaster and more complex
than that of viking Scandinavia. All languages and dialects
are there for him to draw on at will and the shop talk of all

trades and the slang of all towns. Like every great craftsman
he freely makes use of all that he finds existing and adds
thereto his own inventions. In this connections it seems
curious that the inventor of a wireless gadget or of a patent
medicine may burden the dictionary with a new compound
but that the poetshall be forbiddden an expressive word because
it has never been used before. For Joyce’s purpose no word
is unpoetic — none obsolete. Words fallen out of use are
racial experience alive but unremembered. When in the
poet’s imagination the past experience is relived the dormant
word awakes to new life and the poet’s listeners are lifted out
of their social, functional grooves and partake of the integral
life of the race. The average literary snob would reject half
the material that Joyce uses and no one but an artist of sove-
reign freedom and tireless logic could subdue such headstrong
stufl to the purpose of his design.

Necessarily, for every one poetic device of the skald Joyce
must have a hundred. The kenning was extensive. In every
case the theme was expanded. Odin was the Wielder of
Gungni ; Thor, Hrungni’s bane, God of Goats, Hallower of
Earth ; Sleep, a parliament of dreams ; the eye, a cauldron of
tears ; a ship, a plank bear, and so on. The object was ima-
ginatively reborn in the light of each new name. The univer-
sality of Joyce’s theme dictates an intensive technique — a
greater density of word texture. Meanings can no longer lie
side by side. Here they overlap and there into one word he
crowds a whole family of them. A letter added or left out —
the sound of a vowel or consonant modified — and a host of
associations is admitted within the gates. And one letter
may stand pregnant with meaning as a rune. Through this
singular compactness a page of Joyce’s composition acquires
some of the potency of a picture. The words seem to glitter

with significance as they lie on the printed page. We speak
them and they flow like a river over our consciousness evo-
king images vivid and unexpected as those of a dream.

The Eddie poet tells us Odin had two ravens, Thought and
Memory. He sent them out into the world every day
( “ and he loosed two croakers from under his tilt, the groud
Phenician rover ”). Thought he loved, but if Memory came
not back, how could he endure the loss? This expresses the
normal human valuation. Next to the wish to livelies the wish
to remember — after experiencing we want to possess our-
selves of our experiences through memory. Modern art and
modern psychology witness how strong is this urge in the
individual. He recaptures for himself and hears from the
lips of others the story of his earliest days. He pursues his
dreams to the places where they hide, finds them and adopts
them. He hates his drunken brother but pastes pictures of
his grotesque antics in the family album. In Work in Pro-
gress the poet’s imagination seems one with racial memory.
Human society in its groups, tribes, nations, races, searches
the earth and its legends for the story ot its beginning. But
it is not as an historical hypothesis that Joyce recreates for us
the birth of the city (“ Twillby, Twillby ’’). The growth of
the spoken and written word (“ if you are abcedminded ”) —
the invention of tools, born of “ Moppa Necessity mother of
Injins ”. It is rather as if these things were personal experien-
ces once forgotten and by a prodigious effort of memory
brought to mind.

I see alarge humanity in Joyce’s work. None ot his contem-
poraries is so free from highbrow snobbishness and the super-
iority complex. The characters in Ulysses are of the com-
mon run of average humanity. Joyce didn’t find them at
hunt balls, country house parties and the Chelsea Studios

of millionaire dilettanti but in trams, pubs, shops and the
common streets and houses where the mass of the people
spend their lives. Ulysses is one day in a certain town
but the Adventures of the living and thinking body are as
understandable everywhere and at any time as music or a
drawing.

And the persons in Work in Progress are as universal as the
words through which they live. Adam and Eva, Cain and
Abel, Michael and Lucifer, the god who walked in the Garden
of Eden and his contemporaries who thundered from the skies
of Greece and Scandinavia, the wandering brother of the wide
open spaces and the brother of intellectual experiences — anta-
gonistic and inseparable. They are the representative persons
of the mind of the human race. The difficulty in enter-
ing into the imaginative world of Work in Progress lies in
no unessential obscurity on Joyce’s part but in our own atro-
phied word sense due in large measure to the fact that our
sensibilities have been steam-rollered flat by a vast bulk of
machine made fiction . The reader is becoming rarer than the
writer. The words of dead poets are read and confirmed like
the minutes of the previous meeting, with perhaps the dis-
sentient voice of one Scotch shareholder. Taken as read?
Agreed. Agreed. (Sonnet 43, When most I wink”) But
“ Work in Progress ” is obviously the next business on the
agenda paper, and if the words of a contemporary are not as
plain as a soap advertisement on a hoarding there is an outcry-
as if no mystery in poetry had ever been. Every poet’s work
has always presupposed the necessary religious and mythical
knowledge on the part of his hearers and an active imagina-
tion to follow identity through change.

The Jute and Mutt dialogue (Transition No. i) besides being
a passage of great beauty and a good example of Joyce’s

recreation of our poetic tongue, is essentially northern in cha-
racter. If stick and stone had speech to tell the story of more
transient shapes this is surely their authentic utterance and
this their unmistakeable character, humorous, harmless and
earthy. Only in the Edda where wise giant and Sybil and
wiser god discuss the origin and destiny of the world do I find
a similar sense of the mystery of creation, Mutt and Jute
approach each other like the vast slow moving figures on stilts
out of some dreamt-of pantomine and their greetings are the
purposeful and significant misunderstandings of slapstick
comedians.

Jute : Are you Jeff ?

Mutt : Some hards.

Jute : But you are not jeffmute ?

Mutt : Noho. Only an utterer.

Jute : Whoa ? Whoat is the mutter with you ?

They mimic the tribute giving and taking of vanished gen-
erations as clowns holding the stage after the exit of great an-
tagonists.

Jute : Let me cross your qualm with trink gilt. Here have
sylvan coyne, a piece of oak.

Mutt : Louee, louee ! How wooden I not know it, the
intellible greyt-cloak of Cedric Silkyshag I... Here where the
liveries, monomark. There where the missers mooney Min-
nikin passe.

The echo of the clamour of a great battle appears to them
ghostlike.

Mutt : Just how a puddinstone inat the brook cells by a
river pool.

Jute : Load Allmarshy ! Widwad fora Norse like ?

Mutt : Somular with a bull on a clompturf. Rooks roa-
rum rex roome ! I could snore to him of the spumy horn.

with his woolseley side in, by the neck I am sutton on, did
Brian d’ of Linn.

Shapes of land and water moulded by elemental forces,
compel, in their turn, the placing of cities and habitations ot
mankind. Mutt calls Jute to witness : —

“ Walk a dun blink round this allbutisle and you skull
see how olde yeplaine of my Liters, hunfreeand ours, where
wone to wail whimbrel to peewee o’er the saltings, where
wilby citie by law of isthmon, where by a droit of signory,
icefloe was from his Inn the Byggning to whose Finishthere
Punct. ”

And further he sees a thousand years of human destinies
crowded into the silence and fury of a snowstorm on a river : —

“Countlessness of live stories have nether fallen by this
plage, flick as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like a waast wiz-
zard all of whirlworlds. Now are all tombed to the mound,
isgesto isges, erde from erde. Pride, O pride, thy prize I ”

Settler and raider lie buried together and out of their dust
arise new forms of life : —

Mutt : Meldundleize ! And thanacestross mound have
swollup them all. This ourth of years is not save brickdust
and being humus the same roturns. He who runes may rede
it on all fours.

And as the unwilling Sybil sinks to the underworld and the
old giant forfeits his wagered head and the god departs, so the
familiar spirits of this river valley become again silent and
immobile.

Mutt : Ore you astonaged, jute you ?

Jute : Oye am thonthorstrok, thing mud.

The Scandinavian poet treated his gods familiarly as being
human like himself. Joyce does the same ; and singularly
enough the similarity extends to their special treatment of the

thunder god. Loki flouts each brother and sister deity in
turn. He derides the cowardice of the brave, confounds the
virtuous with their vices and jeers at the peacemaker for his
fruitless meddling. The entry of the thunder god silences
him. “ For I know that thou wilt strike ”. In Ulysses the
thunder god, disguised as phenomenon, interrupts a discus-
sion on birth control with similar effect. His role in “ Work
in Progress ” is still more important. Here he is ever pre-
sent, woven as a coloured strand in a tapestry, side by side
with all other elemental human values. Fear of a soaking,
fear, at most, of a lightning struck chimney pot or
doubt as to the efficiency of lightning conductors is all that
most of us are capable of experiencing at the approach of a
thunderstorm. But we may be sure that Thor was a living
god before he got pensioned olf as a myth. We hear him in
Work in Progress, as in the Edda, the friend and aflfrighter
of man, present at the origins of human society as the inspi-
rer of that fear which is the beginning of wisdom.

The many names and states of Mr. Earwicker recall those
of Odin with his legion of names — Grimni atGeirrod’s, Val-
father on the battlefield, Ygg on the scaffold, Bolverk on the
harvest field, Gangleri going up and down the world obser-
ving and learning Out of his own labour and a woman’s suf-
ferings he got the gift of song. He learned how to get off
with women and how to get on with them, how to drink ale
with friends, when to speak and when to be silent and he
passed on his knowledge to his juniors. In his multiple per-
sonality and his sum of human experience Mr. Earwicker is
of Odin’s kin. But Odin feels mental and physical pain.
He loses an eye and he hangs nine nights on a wind-swept
tree, offered, a sacrifice, himself to himself. In Joyce’s inten-
sely bright composition all human experience is transposed

into a key ot glittering humour which is the essential pro-
vince of the intelligence. He discovers in and extracts outot
every phase of human experience its intelligent counterpart
as a painter distils out of his motive its essence of colour.

Work in Progress gives a bird’s eye view of the time lands-
cape. We see it all at once — as in a section of Earth laid
bare by a landslide we see the changes of a million years lying
exposed in a few square feet.

I walked with Mr. Bloom, pro tern, traveller in Space-time
over Essex Bridge, Sat with him eating liver and bacon in the
Ormond hotel, heard with him the Clock Strike nine, stood
guard over Stephen and went home with him. In Work in
Progress it is I alone who am compelled ideally to move from
the Garden of Eden to Eden Quay in the turn of a word
those Elements which are the personages of Joyce’s book
being appropriately present anywhere at any time.

Thus the beginning of the world and the events of today
may lie side by sideembedded in the rhythm of last year’s catch
phrase (“ Ere beam slewed cable or Derzherr, live wire, fired
Benjermine Funkling outa th’ Empyre, Sin righthand Son ”).
Ancient fable and new fact — starting point and goal become
one. Dramatic conflict in its sexual, racial, social manifesta-
tions is presented as implicit in its characteristic sign, —
construct ann aquilittoral dry ankle...

Whatever the elements brought together they have the
rightness of a dream wherein all things we ever knew or
experienced occur notin their time sequence but according to
their necessary importance in the pattern dictated by the
dream’s own purpose and logic. And this I take to be the
key to the understanding of Work in Progress and the secret
of its peculiar beauty. In Ulysses is the life — real life — of
day ; here the reality — super reality — of night. The liver

and bacon that Bloom ate was limited — not alluring perhaps,
but smellable, tasteable and filling, whereas the vast appetite
of Shaun is fed on mountains of provoking but unsubstantial
food. While the loaves are aflowering and the nachtin-
gale jugs. ” And there is abundant refreshment forthe mour-
ners at Finnegan’s wake but they are warned. — “ But, lo,
as you would quaffoff his fraudstuff and sink teeth through
that pyth of a flowerwhite bodey, behold of him as behemoth
for he is nowhemoe ”, Joyce has penetrated into the night mind
of man, his timeless existence in sleep, his incommunicable
experiences in dreams. He is under the spell neither of sleep
nor dream but in this vast unexplored province he has found
the material with which he is writing the life and adventures
of the human mind.

PROLEGOMENA TO WORK IN PROGRESS

STUART GILBERT

PROLEGOMENA TO WORK IN PROGRESS

Stuart Gilbert.

" Great poets are obscure for two opposite reasons ; now,
because they are talking about something too large for anyone
to understand and now, again, because they are talking about
something too small for anyone to see. ” 'With this pream-
ble Chesterton introduces his study of that profoundest of
nineteenth-century English poets, Francis Thompson. " In
one of his poems ”, Chesterton continues, " he says that the
abyss between the known and the unknown is bridged by
' pontifical death ’. There are about ten historical and theo-
logical puns * in that one word. That a priest means a pon-
tiff, that a pontiff^ means a bridge-maker, that death certainly

1 . Quoi de plus divertissant et de plus instructif, tout ensemble, qu*un beau

calembouret-jmologique? (Victor Berard : p. io6) The importance

of Homeric influences on James Joyce’s work can hardly be overestimated, and
it is noteworthy that the Odyssey begins with a pun on the name of its hero ;

ou vu t' ’OSuaaeu?

’Apysttov Tcapa V7)vai ■^ap’Xsxo Upa pe^tov
Tpo{^ kv £up£i^ ; Tt vu ot Toaov (oSuaao, Zeu ;

Odyssey /. 60-62.

2. With this use of "pontiff ” a passage from the Anna Li via (Anna Lit-
fey) section of Mr Joyce’s work, which, in some respects, reminds one of a

is a bridge, that death may turn out to be a reconciling priest,
that at least priest and bridges both attest to the fact that one
thing can get separated from another thing — these ideas, and
twenty more, are all tacitly concentrated in the word ' ponti-
fical ’ It is not an accident that in casting about for some
anticipation in English literature of the uncompromising bril-
liance of James Joyce’s latest work (for, after all, poets are
born not made, and — unless another miracle be presumed
-- the conception of a poet cannot be wholly immaculate), the
first name that suggests itself should be that of Francis Thomp-
son, that Crashaw ‘ * born again, but born greater For
Thompson, too, wrote of something too large for anyone
to understand ”, and since infinite greatness is — but for cer-
tain flashes when our sight is focussed to a god’s-eye view of
the universe — intellectually and linguistically out of our
reach, not only is the poet’s vision, in itself, difficult of ap-
prehension, but the language of common speech must often
prove inadequate to express concepts perceived sub specie
ceternitatis.

There are, in fact, two difficulties (or, rather, two aspects of
the same difficulty) to disconcert a reader of WorAiw Progress,
Perplexed, he poses first the essential question '' What is it
all about ? ” adding, soito voce, a plaintive afterthought
'' Why, anyhow, does the author make it so difficult ? * ”

Homeric " catalogue ” — in this case, of rivers, their names welded into
words may be compared. '' Do you know she was calling backwater
girls from all around to go in till him, her erring man, and tickle the pontiff
aisy-oisy } ”

I. It is significant that these questions What is it all about? and Why does
the author make it so difficult ? are the very cris de coeur of Everyman when some
unforeseen catastrophe makes of him a target for the arrows of outrageous
fortune, and, baffled by this seemingly wanton cruelty, he asks himself what
on earth or in heaven the Demiurge was about when He contrived his laby-

The subject of Work in Progress may easiest be grasped
by a reference to Vico’s Scien^a nuova, a treatise on the philo-
sophy ofhistory which appeared about two hundred years ago.
The reception of Vico’s work was that which too often
awaits the philosopher attempting a new synthesis of the
disparate phenomena which make up world-history. The
story goes that a contemporary savant^ Capasso, after an un-
successful attempt to digest Vico’s work, ran ostentatiously to
his doctor to have his pulse taken, and a certain Neapolitan
noble, asked for news of the writer, tersely replied ' * Off his
head I ” Vico proposed the making of an ideal and time-
less history in which all the actual histories of all nations
should be embodied ”. Human societies begin, he conten-
ded, develop and have their end according to certain fixed
laws of rotation ; there is a recurrent cycle in human ' ' pro-
gress ”, as in the astronomical domain. (Observe the subtle
implications of the title Work in Progress). But this
natural history of man is not, as might be expected, to be
discovered by a mere series of inductions from past events.
The essential facts are embodied in the lives, true or legen-
dary, of national heroes ; they are revealed through human
personalities, rather than by acts or events. In his preface to
Vico’s works Michelet has succinctly set out this relation be-
tween the heroic personality and the so-called " ' facts ” af his-
tory. ' ' The principle of the New Science is this : humanity
is its own creation. The heroes of myth, Hercules whose
arms rend the mountains, Lycurgus or Romulus, law-givers
who in a man’s lifetime accomplished the long work of cen-

rinthine universe. Thus, too, Mr. H.G. Wells’ young giant, seeing for the
first time the crowded confusion of modern life (vide The Food oj the Gods),
mutters : " I don’t understand... What are all you people doing with your-
selves ? What’s it all for ? What is it all for and where do I come in ? ”

turies — all these are creations of the peoples’ thoughts. God
alone is great. When man craved for men-like-gods he had
his way by combining generations in an individual, by incar-
nating in a single hero the ideas of a whole cycle of creation.
Thus he fashioned his historical idols, a Romulus or a Numa.
Before these shadowy heroes the peoples made obeisance.
But the philosopher bids them rise : ' That which you adore ’,
he says, ' is but yourselves, your own conception Hitherto
mankind believed that all progress was due to chance appear-
ances of individual genius. Political, religious, poetic
advance was ascribed to the unexplained talent of certain in-
dividuals, splendid but incomprehensible. History was a ste-
rile show, at best a diverting shadow-play. ” The aim of the
new science was to illustrate the fundamental unity of history,
God’s work in progress, which is not based (as, at first sight,
it would seem) on sporadic advances due to the accidental
genius of individuals, but on a general and inevitable move-
ment of mankind as a whole, a trend recurrent and predict-
able like that of the tides, embodied, crystallized in great per-
sonalities. Thus, speaking of the ' sages’, Vico remarks that
Solon was neither more nor less than the people of Athens,
awakened to consciousness of its rights, the true founder of
democracy. Dracon was simply the emblem of an aristo-
cratic tyranny which preceded the change. ” ' * The diversity

of views as to Homer’s birthplace forces us to the conclusion
that, when the various races of Greece disputed among them-
selves the honour of claiming him as one of theirs, it was
because they themselves were Homer. ”

Vico places the beginnings of human history one or two
centuries after the Deluge. The earth had grown dry and a
storm brooded dark above the hills, on whose summits lonely
giants roamed. Suddenly sounded a crash of thunder and.

terrified by this happening whose reason they ignored, they
raised their eyes and gazed for the first time heavenwards”.
That was the beginning of what we call civilisation. Their
fear of the sky (the heavens personify the first of the gods to
all primitive peoples) was the beginning of wisdom. It drove
them to refuge in dark caverns of the earth and thus arose
the idea of the family and man’s first attempt at 'virtue’.
Hitherto, these giants, like beasts of the field, had fornicated
openly with the female of the moment. Now, after the sky-
god had spoken by his thunder, they were ashamed of open
coition ; each took to his cave a single woman and with her,
in darkness, founded a family. Thus, for Vico, the etymo-
logy of * Jupiter ’ is jus pater: the sky is not merely the
allfather but also the source of law and justice, of the family
tie and social consciousness. But not only did the voice of
the thunder inspire the brutish giants with ideas of shame
and justice ; the strong emotion of their fear loosened their
tongues and they ejaculated the first monosyllable of the lan-
guage, the name of father, that word which in all tongues has
the same root. It is significant that Work in Progress opens
with a crash of thunder.

James Joyce’s new work, in fact, (as far as can be judged
from the portion of it which Transition has so far published)
is, in one of its aspects, a realization of the Italian philo-
sopher’s conception of an " ideal history those " eternal
laws which all nations observe in their beginnings and deve-
lopments, in their decay and death, laws which, if world upon
world were born in infinite eternity, would still hold good
for those new worlds ”. Under the variety of external forms
there is an essential identity between all peoples, all histories,
which is embodied in the legends and lives of their national
heroes. Work in Progress is, indeed, a book of heroes,

many of whom are merged in the panheroic figure of H. C. E.
(Here Comes Everybody). Vico’s work, moreover, is much
preoccupied with the root-meanings of words (their associa-
tive rather than strictly etymological implications) and he

contemplated the formation of a ' mental vocabulary ’ ”,
whose object would be to explain all languages that exist by
an ideal synthesis of their varied expressions. And now,
after two centuries, such a synthesis of history and of lan-
guage, a task which seemed almost beyond human achieve-
ment, is being realised by James Joyce in his latest work.

To a certain extent, therefore, the verbal difficulties ot
Work in Progress are accounted for by the nature of the sub-
ject. It is obvious that in this composite picture of the life of
mankind, where mythical heroes of the past, characters of
biblical legend and notabilities of recent times are treated as
one and the same protagonist, the style was bound to reflect
the kaleidoscopic permutations of the temporal, physical and
spatial attributes of the " hero ”. But in the verbal struc-
ture of Mr Joyce’s new work there is a personal element which
had already manifested itself in Ulysses and was, strangely
enough, overlooked even by appreciative critics. Thus, in a
recent study of Ulysses a commentator quotes at length the
following passage from the opening of the Oxen of the Sun
(Lying-in Hospital) episode and condemns it as "unconditio-
nally inept and unpardonable”. " Merely to arrange words
in the form of a Chinese puzzle is pointless. It is unfortu-
nate that Mr Joyce has chosen to commit this folJy so many
times in a work of such significance. ” The passage is as fol-
lows.

" Universally that person’s acumen is esteemed very little
perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as

most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be stu-
died who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erud-
ite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind’s or-
nament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by
general consent they affirm that other circumstances being
equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation
more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far
forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for
that prolilerant continuance which of evils the original if it be
absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign
of omnipollent nature’s incorrupted benefaction. ”

The obscurity of that passage, its prolixity and redundancy
— all are deliberate, and artistically logical. For this whole
episode of the Oxen of the Sun is constructed so as to follow the
growth of the embryo from its dark and formless origin to the
hour of its emergence into the light of day, a fully developed
and perfected child. The style of this section of Ulysses is at
first dark and shapeless. Gradually the diction takes form
and clarifies itself till it culminates in a futurist cacophony of
syncopated slang, the jargon of our latest and loudest/ewwe^^e
nickelee. But, before this outburst, the language ascends in
orderly march the gamut of English styles — of Mallory, Man*
deville, Bunyan, Addison, Sterne, Landor, Macaulay, Ruskin,
Carlyle and others. (It may be noted, however, that, as in
the unborn embryo there is often premature development of
a certain part, so there are occasional patches in the first sec-
tion of the Oxen of the Sun where the terseness and clarity of
later styles are anticipated.)

In the Sirens episode, again, the structure of the chapter
strictly follows the form of a fuga per canonem. Not only
this, but the terminology is chosen so as to include musical
metaphors and terms. " Fall flat ”, " sound as a bell ”,

all for his own gut ”, “ stave it off ” — these and man)'
other such idioms were deliberately selected for their musical
associations.

The literary device employed by Mr Joyce in these episodes is
not, as might appear at first sight, a mere caprice or tour de
force, but has its justification in the origins of human speech.
The earliest language was (as Vico points out) that of signs ;
the human animal was, in fact, dumb. He indicated the
subject of his thought by pointing a finger at the object.
The next stage was the naming of objects by ejaculated
monosyllables. Then the name of the thing itself was
used by extension to signify a wider, even an abstract,
concept. From this view of the origin of language it
follows that the use of simile and trope was not, as is
generally believed, a poetic artifice, but was imposed on pri-
mitive man by the very conditions of his development and
limits of his vocabulary. If we talk of the mouth of a river,
for instance, we do not use the word ' mouth ’ because it
seems a felicitous metaphor but because the makers of the
language could conceive of no possible alternative ; indeed,
unless we have recourse to scientific jargon, no better term
has yet been invented. In carefully adapting his words to his
subject-matter, Mr Joyce is not performing a mere conjuring-
trick with the immense vocabulary he has at his command but
is going back to the original and natural methods of human
speech. By extension, in such passages as that quoted above,
the adaptation of words to subject was carried into the
domain of style ; but the principle remained the same — the
fixing of the reader’s mind on the subject-matter by every pos-
sible means, the exploitation of every potentiality of the lan-
guage to create a complete harmony between form and
content.

A common error on the part of both professional and ama-
teur critics is that of applying to new literary forms the quasi-
ethical test : " Would I wish all modern literature to be
composed after this model ? ” That test of the universal (of
doubtful value even in the domain of conduct) is quite inap-
plicable to original works of art. It is, rather, the criterion ot
a masterpiece of literature that it stands alone, and this holds
good as well for diction as for form and content. The unu-
sual word-formation of Work in Progress, a constructive
metabolism of the primal matter of language, was called for
by its subject and is thereby justified, but it will in all proba-
bility remain a unique creation — once and only once and by
one only. For it is inconceivable that such a method of wri-
ting could prevail in general or narrative literature and it
would be wrong to see in Work in Progress the promise of a
systematic disintegration of language, or any sort of propa-
ganda for an international tongue, a new Volapiik or Espe-
ranto. Indeed, disciples of the New Word would defeat their
own ends. The word-building of Work in Progress is foun-
ded on the rock of petrified language, of sounds with solid
associations ; were this groundwork to be undermined by a
general decomposition of words, the edifice would in time be
submerged in the shifting sand of incoherence, there would
be a dissolution of logical speech and thought and in the last
end man would revert to his brutish state, as it was in the
beginning before the Lawfather thundered.

A dangerous game, in truth, the jeu de mots, this vivisec-
tion of the Word made Flesh ! But so, perhaps, was crea-
tion itself — the rash invention of a progressive Olympian
with a penchant for practical jokes.

A consciousness of this ' ' joky ” side of creation pervades
Work in Progress. The world is indeed a Wonderland ot

perpetual surprises for every Alice of us. In the reductto ad
absurdum of the processes of human thought — for absurdity
is latent there behind the looking-glass of logic — Lewis Car-
roll, that elfin dialectician, excelled ; it is noteworthy that he,
too, experimented in the composition of picturesque and amu-
sing neologisms, '"portmanteau words ” as his Humpty
Dumpty called them. But Carroll’s inventions were exclusi-
vely English and went no further than the telescoping of
English words together, whereas the Irish writer’s vocabulary
is world-wide — Work in Progress may well be easier rea-
ding for a polyglot foreigner than for an Englishman with but
his mother tongue — and he compresses allusions rather than
single words. The difference can best be shown by quotation.
Here are two familiar lines from Carroll’s " Jabberwodky

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

They are explained as follows.

" That’s enough to begin with ”, Humpty Dumpty inter-
rupted : ' ' there are plenty of hard words there. ' Brillig ’
means four o’ clock in the afternoon — the time when you
hegm broiling things for dinner... 'Slithy’ means "lithe
and slimy ’. You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two
meanings packed up into one word... ' Tores ’ are some-
thing like badgers — they’re something like lizards — and
they’re something like corkscrews... To 'gyre’ is to go
round and round like a gyroscope. To " gimble ’ is to make
holes like a gimlet. ”

Humpty Dumpty might have added that " ' brillig ” also
suggests the sunshiny hours and "' gimble ” implies gam-
bol ” ; but no doubt he guessed that Alice, a clever little girl,
could see these allusions for herself.

With these a few lines from Work in Progress may now
be compared. '' Not all the green gold that the Indus contains
would over hinduce them (o. p.) ^ to steeplechange back to their
ancient flash and crash habits of old Pales time - ere beam slewed
cable or Derzherr, live wire, fired Benj ermine Funkling outa
th’Empyre, sin right hand son... ”

The last words of this passage are built on an old music-
hall refrain, popular in those ‘ good old days ’ when the

Empire ” in Leicester Square was the happy-hunting-ground
of the pretty ladies of London town : " There’s hair, like
wire% coming out of the Empire. ” An electrical undercurrent
traverses the whole of this passage, which alludes to the dawn
of pre-history when Vico’s thunderclap came to rescue man
from his wild estate ; the ' ' flash and crash days ”. * ' Beam

slewed cable ” hints at the legend of Cain and Abel, which is
frequently referred to in Work in Progress. " There’s hair”
has crystallized into ‘‘ Derzherr” — Der Er^herr (arch-lord)
— - with a sidethrust at the hairy God of illustrated bibles.
He is a " live wire ” — a bustling director. “ Benjamin ”
means literally ' ' son-of-the-right-hand ” ; here the allusion is
to Lucifer (the favourite archangel till his rebellion) as well
as to Benjamin Franklin, inventorof the lightning-conductor.
The end of his name is written " — jermine ”, in tune with

1. “ our people ” ; indicated by the preceding passage.

2. Pales, the oldest of woodland gods: " Palestine ” is also implied.

3. " Hair like wire ”, curiously enough, brings us back to Lewis CarrolL
who may have had some part in the procreation of the phrase. Isa Bowman in
her Story of Lewis Carroll (p. 24), speaking of his insistence on accuracy,
relates : ” I remember how anrfoyed he was when, after a morning’s sea bath-
ing at Eastbourne, I exclaimed : ' Oh this salt water, it always makes my
hair as stiff as a poker ! ’ He impressed it on me quite irritably that no little
girl’s hair could ever possibly get as stiff as a poker. ' If you had said stijff
as wires, it would have been more like it’ ” Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 130.

the German word Er^herr, which precedes, and " Funkling’’
(a diminutive of the German Funke — a spark), which follows.
Also we can see in this word a clear, if colloquial, allusion to
the angel’s panic flight before the fires of God. In the back
ground of the passage a reference to the doom of Prometheus,
the fire-bringer, is certainly latent. ‘ ' Outa ” — the America-
nism recalls ' * live wire ”, as well as such associations as
‘‘ outer darkness ” — Lucifer’s exile in the void. “Empyre ’’
suggests Empyrean, highest heaven, the sphere of fire (from
“ ”, the Latinized form of the Greek root “ pur ” — fire)-

Finally, sin implies at once the German possessive sein (his),
and the archangel’s fall from grace.

This passage illustrates the manner in which a foliates
outwards through the surrounding text, beginning from a single
word — here the “ flash ” in “ flash and crash ” has “ elec-
trified ” the words which follow, and a German formation
has similarly ramified into the context. All through Work
in Progress similar foliations may be traced, outspreading,
overlapping, enmeshed together ; at last deciduous, as new
and stronger motifs thrust upwards into the light. The dif-
ference in texture between such complexity and Carroll’s oc-
casional use of “ portmanteau words ” is evident. A simi-
lar contrast can be established between the neologies of
Work in Progress and the new-coined words of Edward
Lear, which, though they have not the same currency as Car-
roll’s, are no less rich in verbal humour. Lear, too, had a
gift for depicting droll or fantastic personages.

His Waistcoat and Trowsers were made of Pork Chops ;

His Buttons were Jujubes and Chocolate Drops ;

His Coat was all Paficakes with Jam for a border.

And a girdle of Biscuits to keep it in order ;

And he wore over all, as a screen from bad weather ,

A Cloak of green Cabbage-leaves stitched all together.

In this “ nonsense rhyme ” of Lear, The New Vestments,
there is a curious anticipation of the idea of comestible dress
developed by Mr Joyce in a description of Shaun’s apparel
(Transition, n® 12) ; his “ star-spangled zephyr... with his motto
through dear life embrothered over it in peas, rice and yeggyolk, ”
and his “ gigottumups ”

Lear’s method of dovetailing words together (“ scroobious ”,
“ slobaciously ”) may be compared to an Englishman’s way
of carving a leg of mutton ; he cuts vertically through the
meat of sound and the fat of common sense, with an eye only
to the funny effect of the chunk removed ; whereas the Irish
writer (like Tristan at the decoupage of the deer and to the
wonderment of Mark’s knights) carves his gigot in the conti-
nental manner, that is to say, parallel to the etymological
bone, following the way the muscles are naturally and anato-
mically set. Again, like Gibbon’s “ solemn sneer ”, Lear’s
humour often depends on pairs of words, usually adjectives,
unequally yoked together. “ All the bluebottle flies began to
bu\t{ at once in a sumptuous and sonorous manner, the melo-
dious and mucilaginous sounds echoing all over the waters and
resounding across the tumultuous tops of the transitory Tit-
mice upon the intervening and verdant mountains with a serene
and sickly suavity. ” A travesty of Gibbon’s use of paired
words is found in Ulysses. “ Silent in unanimous exhaus-
tion and approbation the delegates, chafing under the length
and solemnity of their vigil and hoping that the joyful occur-
rence would palliate a licence which the simultaneous absence
of abigail and officer rendered the easier broke out at once
into a strife of tongues. ” In Work in Progress the treatment

of pairs of ideas is symbolical, in the exact meaning of that
word ; ideas are fused together. Thus in “ gigot turnups ” we
have the ideas of leg-of-mutton sleeves and their inferior coun-
terpart, pegtop trousers, turned up in the modern manner,
fused into one. Both Lear and Joyce exploit the incongruous,
basis of all humour, but, while Lear’s incongruities are laid
side by side in comic pairs, Joyce’s are symbolised, merged in
one — the exact opposite of the Lear-Gibbon hendiadys.
This fusion of ideas is illustrated in the description of the
tree of life, “ our sovereign beingstalk, ” and the “ origin of
spices ” {Transition, n® 15). Lear’s extravagance are airy
nothings, soaring on dual wings of candid nonsense, whereas
Mr Joyce’s for all their subtile buoyancy, are gravid with the
seeds of red magic.

There is also a radical contrast between the humour of
Carroll and Lear and the almost demoniac ribaldry of parts
of Work in Progress. In the lines quoted above it is signifi-
cant that the nearly meaningless catch of a London music-hall
song should serve Joyce as the warp whereon to weave the story
of divine reprisal on a revolting archangel. Of all the aspects
of Work in Progress this, perhaps, will prove the most dis-
concerting to the general reader. The boisterous joviality of
certain passages, the verbal horseplay, for instance, of that past-
master of conceit. Jaunty Jaun, will certainly offend those who
hold that gravity should exclude buoyancy in treating of first
and last things. But, after all, the terms “ heavy ” and
“ light ” are relative ; birth and death, the story of the Fall,
God’s mysterious ways to man — all these are tragic or absurd
according to the observer’s standpoint ; exclusive seriousness,
indeed, is a colour-blindness of the intellect.

Given the subject of Work in Progress, the form and lan-
guage employed followed as a matter of course. The perso-

nality of H. C. E., polymorphous yet strangely self-consistent,
heroic yet human all-too-human, dominates the book from
its broken beginning, the point arbitrarily chosen (since for
time-bound man a beginning there must be) for us to set foot
upon the circular track of the New History. The difficulties
of the text are conditioned by the subject, for the language is
world-wide as the theme. Words are built up out of sounds
whose associations range over many frontiers, whose echoes
ricochet from the ends of the earth. In this spectral realm of
gigantic shadows, of river and mountain seen nearly or dimly
as the nightclouds now lift now close in again, lies revealed
the ageless panorama of the race, our own world and yet an-
other. To comprehend this new vision of a timeless world
something is needed of the clairvoyant audacity of Francis
Thompson’s last poem :

0 World invisible, we view thee,

0 World intangible, we touch thee,

0 World unknowable, we know thee.

Inapprehensible, we clutch thee 1

The foregoing remarks may, it is hoped, suffice to give a
general view of the method and scope of Work in Progress,
but it may not be unprofitable to add a pratical illustration
of the manner in which to read the work (perhaps not with-
out some mental effort, certainly with ultimate enjoyment)
and look for the allusions embedded, obscurely sometimes, it
cannot be denied, and beneath the surface, in the text. The
following passage is taken from the fragment published in

Transition No. (pp. 17-19) and is reprinted with permission
of the editor and author.

Sis dearest, Jaun added, with voise somewhit murky as he tur-
ned his dorse to her to pay court to it, melancholic this time
whiles his onsaturncast eyes in stellar attraction followed swift
to an imaginary swellaw, 0, the vanity of Vanissy ! All ends vanis-
hing! Pursonally, Grog help me, I am in no violent hurry. If
time enough lost the ducks walking easy found them. I’ll nose
a blue fonx with any tristys blinking upon this earthlight of all
them that pass by the way of the deerdrive or Wilfrid’s walk but
I’d turn back as lief as not if I could only spoonfind the nippy
girl of my heart’s appointment Mona Vera Toutou Ipostila, my
lady of Lyons, to guide me by gastronomy under her safe conduct.
That’s more in my line. Td ask no kinder of fates than to stay
where I am, under the invocation of Saint Jamas Hanway, servant
of Gamp, lapidated, and Jacobus A Pershawm, intercissous, for
my thurifex, with Peter Roche that frind of my boozum, leaning
on my cubits, at this passing moment by localoption in the birds’
lodging me pheasants among, with me hares standing up well and
me longears dittoes till well on into the beausome of the exha-
ling night, picking stopandgo jewels out of the hedges and cat-
ching dimtop brilliants on the tip of my wagger for them breezes
zipping round by Drumsally do be devils to play fleurt. I could
sit on safe side till the bark of Saint Grousers for hoopoe’s hours,
laughing lazy at the sheep’s lightning, hearing the mails across
the nightrives (peepet I peepet I) and whippoor willy in the woody
(moor park I moor park !) as peacefed as a philopotamus, and
crekking jugs at the grenoulls, leaving tea for the trout and bel-
leeks for the wary, till I’d followed through my upfielded neviews-
cope the rugaby moon cumuliously godrolling himself westasleep
amuckst the cloudscrums for to watch how carefully my nocturnal

goosemother would lay her new golden sheegg for me down under
in the shy orient. What wouldn’t I poach — the rent in my
riverside my otther shoes, my beavery, honest ! — for a dace
feast of grannom with the finny ones, flashing down the swans-
way, leaps ahead of the swift mac Eels and the pursewinded car-
pers, rearin antis rood perches astench of me, or, when I’d like
own company best, with the help of a norange and bear, to be
reclined by the lasher on my logansome, my g. b. d. in my f. a.
c. e., solfanelly in my shellyholders and lov’d latakia the benuvo-
lent, for my nosethrills with the jealosomines wilting away to
their heart’s deelight and the king of saptimher letting down his
humely odours for my consternation, dapping my griffon, burning
water in the spearlight, or catching trophies of the king’s royal
college of sturgeons by the armful for to bake pike and pie while,
0 twined me abower in L’Alouette’s Tower, all Adelaide’s naug-
htingerls, ]uckjucking benighth me, I’d tonic my twittynice
Dorian blackbudds off my singasongapiccolo to pipe musicall airs
on numberous fairyaciodes. I give, a king, to me, she does alone
up there, yes see, I double give till the spinney all eclosed asong
with them. Isn’t that lovely though ? I give to me alone I trou-
ble give ! And what sensitive coin I’d be possessed of, at Latou-
che’s begor I’d sink it sumtotal, every dolly farting, in vestments
of subdominal poteen at prime cost and I bait you the whole ounce
you half on your backboard that I’m the gogetter that’d make it
pay like cash registers. And, what with one man’s fish and a
dozen mens poissons. I’d come out with my magic fluke in close
time, fair, free and frolicky, zooming tophole on the mart as a
factor. And I tell you the Bectives wouldn’t hold me. By the
unsleeping Solman Annadromus, ye god of little pescies, nothing
would stop me for mony makes multimony like the brogues and
the kishes. Not the Ulster Rifles and the Cork Milice and the
Dublin fusees and Connacht Rangers ensembled. I’d axe the chan-

non and leip a liffey and drink anny black water that rann onme
way. Yip ! How’s thats for scats, mine shatz, for a love-
bird ? To funk is only peternatural its daring feers divine.
Bebold ! Like Varian’s sweeping all behind me. Aud before you
knew where you weren’t I stake my ignitial’s davy, cash-and-
cash can-again, I’d be staggering humanity and loyally rolling you
over, my sponse, in my tons of red clover, fiehigh and fiehigher
and fiehighest of all. I’d spoil you altogether. Not a spot of my
hide but you’d love to seek and scanagain. There’d be no stan-
ding me, I tell you. And as gameboy as my pagan name K. G. is
what it is I’d never say letfly till Fd plant you, my Gizzygay, on
the electric ottoman in the lap of lechery simpringly stitchles
with admiracion among the most uxuriously furnished compart-
ments with sybarate cham bers Just as I’d run my shoestring into
near a million of them as a firstclass dealer and everything. Only
for one thing that Fd be awful anxious, you understand, about
shoepisser pluvious and in assideration of the terrible luftsucks
playing around in the coold amstophere till the borting that
would perish the Dane and his chapter of accidents to be atra-
mental to the better half of my alltoolyrical health, not conside-
ring my capsflap, an that’s the truth now out of the cackling bag
for truly sure for another thing I never could tell the leest false-
hood that would truthfully give sotisfiction I’m not talking apple
sauce eithou. Orupinmyhat. I earnst. Schuef

The above passage occurs in a sermon delivered by Jaunty
Jaun to his congregation of the twenty-nine girls who figure
as a female plebiscite ” in Work in Progress, - The form
is that of a “ lenten pastoral and it is interesting to compare
Jaun’s homily with the series of sermons delivered at the
“ retreat ” described in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man. Jaun is the jovial, blustering type of Irishman who

believes in enjoying life, and the advice he gives to his cha-
pel of girls is a cheerful counterblast to the comminations of
the Jesuit priests. He has much to say about himself ; he is
a boaster, but, like many boasters, a bit of a coward. An
expert in love-making, he is, one feels, an equally competent
love-breaker. The mood of this excerpt is high-spirited fan-
tasy; in texture it is lighter, and in allusion less esoteric,
than those portions of the work which deal directly with the
main theme ; for these reasons, and because it suffers less by
excision, this passage has been selected as a suitable introduct-
ion to the perusal of Work in Progress.

In the notes which follow explanation is given of nearly all
the synthetic words or phrases. The commentary, however,
does not claim to be exhaustive ; some allusions have certainly
been overlooked, a few (e. g. Jacobus A. Per shawm, Variants)
have remained insoluble ; moreover, certain interpretations
are merely tentative. Indeed, one of the fascinations of rea-
ding Work in Progress is that as a mine of suggestion and
allusion it is practically inexhaustable ; apart from its literary
and cosmological innovations, the resolution of its synthetic
word-structures may well have a special appeal to the present
generation of the English-speaking races, whose interest in
words — parvis componere magna — is demonstrated by the
space reserved in contemporary journals for problems in
word-building and word-manipulation.

Voise. — His voice, grown rather hoarse, suggests “ noise
Somewhit. — A trifle less than “ somewhat ”.

Dorse. — He turns his hack on her to pay court to his
voice.

Onsatumcast. — Upwards (towards the planet) plus ‘‘ uncer-
tain ” (timidly).

Stellar. — The allusion is to Dean Swift’s Stella ' ; in the follo-
wing sentence Vanissy (Vanessa) continues the motif.
Swellaw. — He swallows down an impediment in his throat,
looking towards a bird that is not there, a projection of
the “ bird ” allusion in “ swift ”. Swellaw, thus spelt,
may also suggest celestial ordinance.

Pursonally. — He has been complaining that he wants more
money ; Jaun is the sort of man who never has enough
of it.

If time... them. — A variant of the proverb Chi va piano va
sano. If Mr. Time-Enough lost his ducks, Mr. Walking-
Easy found them.

I’ll nose... fonx. — Fonx suggests “ funk ” (a blue funk) as
well as “ fox ”.

With any tristys. — As well as any sad person (Tristram) alive
on the earth.

Of all them... — An echo of the lines “ O all you who pass
by etc. ”

Wilfrid’s walk. — This appears to be a child’s name for some
animal (c. f. Teddy-bear).

I . As in Ulysses, so in Work in Progress, there are many references to
the awful Dean of St Patrick’s ”, and in a recent review of a fragment of
Mr Joyce’s latest work, published under the title Anna Livia Plurabelle, it
was implied that the language of this work was akin to the '' little language ”
in which Swift addressed MD. As the reviewer wittily observed, '' a
little language is a dangerous thing The comparison was, however, inapt.
The prose of Work in Progress is far removed from a " little language ” of
lovers, or those pretty, petty diminutives coined by Presto for Pepette. It
is, on the contrary, a great language, an augmentation of the resources of the
common tongue, like a language of giants or Homer’s "speech of the blessed
gods Moreover, a little language is a sort of private code, significant
only to those ' ' in the know ”. The peculiarity of Mr Joyce’s latest work is
its "Catholicism ”, and most of the difficulties of the text are due to the
ubiquity of its allusions.

Spoonfind. — The ideas of “ kiss ” and “ waitress ” are com-
bined, preparing for “ Lady of Lyons ” — the title of Bul-
wer Lytton’s famous play and an allusion to a popular
restaurant.

Mona Vera... — The one true Catholic (toutou i. e. fondling
and everywhere) and Apostolic Church. Jaun would like
to find a girl with a job of her own to support him so that
he would not have to work. A teashop assistant would
do — or (for Jaun is here in orders) the Church.

Saint Jamas Hanway. — Jonas Hanway (1712-1786) was the
first man to walk the London streets carrying an umbrella.
The Londoners threw stones at him.

Pershawm, intercissous. — I am unable to trace the history ot
this other holy martyr, who was “ cut up ”, as Hanway
was stoned.

Thnrifex. — Suggests thurifer and crucifix. Jaun is fond of
his pipe; further references to this come later. Tobacco
is, in fact, his favourite incense.

Peter Roche. — “ Thou art Peter, and upon this rock etc. ”
Roche also suggests fish^ the roach as well as (I suppose)
ihc anguille sous roche. From this point a “ fish ” motif
begins to insinuate itself. Or, to vary the metaphor, this
word sounds the tonic of the key for the following pas-
sage.

Frind of my boozam. — C. f. .a line from Moore’s “ Meeting
of the Waters “ ’T was that friends, the beloved of my
bosom, were near. ”

Cubits. — Elbows plus Cupids.

With me hares... — He sees himself spending a night in the
woods (Phoenix Park ?) amongst the animals. He will be
rather frightened, his hair will stand on end, his ears pric-
ked up (longears also implies “ rabbits ” ). This part of

Jaun’s sermon is a “ pastoral ” in both senses, and its
language is redolent of the fauna of field and forest.

Beausome. — Suggests bosom and beauty.

Stopandgo jewels. — Glowworms.

Dimtop brilliants. — He will catch misty dew on the tip of his
tongue.

Fleurt. — Recalls the French origin of the word “ flirt ” —
fleurette.

Saint Grousers... This seems to refer to the opening of the
shooting season. Jaun will stay on the safe side till the
lawful season for shooting begins ; “ hoopoes’ hours ”(?).

Sheep’s lightning. — ~ Sheet lightning is to fork lightning as the
sheep to the wolf.

Nightrives. — He hears the night mail-trains going along the
river banks.

Moor park ! — The cry of this Australian bird is said to be
‘‘ More Pork ” I (c. f. Adelaide’s naughtingerls below.)
Also an allusion to Moor Park where Swift met Stella.

Philopotamus. — An apt variant of hippopotamus.

Crekking jugs... ■— He will crack jokes with the (Frenchy) frogs
and his genoux will knock together with panic. Crekking
recalls “ brek-kek-koax ” the classical “ frogs’ chorus ”.

Leaving... trout. — Jaun is lazy; he will be too slack to bring
home his picnic outfit. Belleek is a kind of china.

Neviewscope. — Cloud-gazing telescope ; nepheloscope. (Allu-
sion to Nevsky Prospect? Also, perhaps, to nepotism;
Jaun is sure to have an amicus in curia.)

Rugaby moon.... — Rugby plus lullaby. Jaun sees the moon
rolling between the clouds like a ball between the muddy
feet of the scrum. Westasleep suggests the song “ The
West’s asleep ” (lullaby motif). The moon “ goes to
sleep ” when she reaches the limit of her course.

For to watch... — He will await sunrise.

The rent... — There is a hole in his trdusers on the side
towards the river. Beavery suggests hat-beaver-breviary .

Dace... grannom. — “ Fishing” allusions. The grannom 'is
a fly used by fishermen. The feast of grannom is probably
some fishermen’s festival.

Swansway. — A “ kenning'' for river.

Pursewinded. — - Suggests pursy plus short-winded.

Rearin antis. — An echo of “ rari nantes ". Jaun, of course,
is an easy victor in the LifFey swimming match.

Astench. — Astern plus tench plus stench. They would get
scent of Jaun, from behind, to leeward.

Norange. — The derivation of orange is naranj (Arab :). This
is, in fact, the old form of the word (c. f. apron from nap-
peron). There is here a hint of the rainbow motif which
appears so often in the work.

Bear. — Besides the obvious meaning, the word (German
Birne) is suggested, and the suffix “ or two " (an orange
or two) as in “ carriage and pair ”.

Logansome. — Lonesome ^\us logan-stone (a poised heavy stone
at the river’s edge).

G. b. d. in my f. a. c. e. — An ingenious combination of sug-
gestions for both pipe-smokers and musicians (the notes
on the “ lines ” G B D are between the “ spaces ” F A C E).
The GBD pipe is well known.... Here a “ music motif”
begins to foliate.

Solfanelly. — Suggests the “ tonic solfa ” and solfanelli (Ita-
lian : matches).

Shellyholders. — Hands cupped like shells.

Bcnuvolent. — Italian forms continue. Full of clouds
(jiuvoli).

Jealosomines. — Jessamines plus jealous-of-mine.

Deelight. — The word “ delight ” is thus stressed in the duet
“ The Moon hath raised her lamp above

Saptimber. — Surely it is more reasonable thus to call the
month than “ the seventh ”, when it is really our ninth 1

Dapping. — A method of fishing. Griffeen (?)

Burning water. — The water would be lit up.

Pike and pie. — Suggests “ by and by The p io b muta-
tion was prepared for above.

0 twined... — Echo of a song.

Adelaide’s naughtingerls. Adelaide recalls the song as well
as the town.

I’d tonic... — I’d teach my nine-and-twenty blackbirds how
to sing. (Echo of the nursery rhyme — with musical and
fforal variations.)

Numberous. — Numerosus (musical).

Fairyaciodes. — Variations (fairy — odes).

1 give... -j- This is a translation of the “ tonic sol fa ” names

of the notes in the scale (as an Italian ear might hear
them : do, “ Igive”, re, “ a king”, and so on) : do, re,
mi, fa, sol, la, si, do, I double give: the high do (C).

Eclosed. — Echoed plus (French) e'clore.

I give to me... — This is the major chord (do-mi-sol-do :
CEGC).

Sensitive. — Allusion to the sensitive (note preceding the tonic).

Latouche’s. — Probably a business in which Jaun thinks of
investing : the name is evidently chosen for its musical
association (Jes touches — the keys of a piano). There is
here a foliation of French words. The Latouche in ques-
tion is, perhaps, one of the numerous Huguenot families
settled in Dublin (c. f. Bloom’s reflexions- on Miss Dube-
dat: Ulysses, p. 167. L’Alouette, “ a lark in clear air”, is
also mentioned in Ulysses ; p. 8).

Subdominal. — Abdominal attuned to subdominant. Note
how Jaun in (in) vestments combines, as usual, the lucra-
tive with the ritual.

Bait. — Bef adapted to the “ fish ” motif.

Half... — “Sis ” is lightly clad ; her garments of weigh but
half an ounce.

Factor. — Besides the vague “ business ” allusion in this word
there is a suggestion of the French facteur. One of Jaun’s
avatars is “ Shaun the Post ”.

Bectives. — A football team.

Solman Annadromous. — Solman ‘ suggests {inler alid)'‘'‘ sal-
mon ” (a fish said tp be sleepless). Anadromous — of
fish ascending rivers to spawn. The ‘ n ’ is doubled here
so as to form “ Anna ”, a river prefix often used in Work
in Progress. “ Anna” seems to be a popular corruption
of the Latin amnis ; thus the Anna Liffey was shown in
old maps as Amnis Livius. Anna Livia (the Eve of the
story), “ a judyquean not up to your elb ”, holds, earlier in
the work, a levee of some hundred of her namesakes from
all parts of the earth, including Anna. Sequana (Seine),
Annie Hudson, Susquehanna and good Ann Trent.
Pescies. — Little fishes (Italian) with, perhaps, a suggestion
of “ sins ” — peches.

Brogues and kishes. — From the Irish expression “ ignorant
as a kish of brogues (a basketful of little shoes ) ”. Here
the “ loaves and fishes ” are hinted at.

1. This association of Solomon and Salmon may be assimilated with the
Irish legend of the salmon of wisdom ” ; to eat the smallest morsel of its
flesh was (as in the the case of the national hero Finn MacCool) to acquire
the gift of wisdon and prophesy (c. f. the " tree of knowledge ” and Pro-
metheus legends, strands of which are often discernable in the texture of
Work in Progress).

Axe the channon. — Channon — ‘‘ Shannon ''plus “ channel

Leip a liffey. — - Nothing could hold up the advances of Jaun
the lover. The leip formation may suggest the “ salmon’s
leap ” (Leixlip).

Annyblack water. — Anny, as above, for amnis. Three Irish
rivers are called “ Blackwater ”.

Scats. — Norwegian for treasure ; in German Schat^.

Peternatural. — Peter, the “ loganstone ” of the Church, made
a very human slip on three famous occasions.

Its daring... — This passage is obscure ; the obvious meaning
is “ It is divine to risk doing the thing one fears ” ; but
in this passage Jaun is making love and, from what prece-
des, seems to be indulging in a certain exhibitionism.
The “ forbidden fruit ” idea, an invitation to some act out
of the normal, seems to be implied.

And before... — This passage goes to the lilt of an Irish
song. Jaun is swinging the girl higher and higher in his
arms.

Ignitial’s davy. — Jaun has a postman’s lamp with him : also
affidavit \s implied.

Hide. — A recall of the “ treasure ” theme, as well as Jaun’s
skin.

Admiracion. — She simpers her admiration.

Sybarate — Separate plus sybarite. The separation has

bisected cbambers.

Run my shoestring. — (American) make easy money. The
American note is appropriate, for Jaun is the sort of Irish-
man who crosses the ocean and makes his pile in the
States.

Assideration... — Jaun thinks how cold it is out in the night
under the stars (assideration). Luftsucks, a variant of the
German Luft^ug, a draught.

Borting. — His cold is getting worse and thus he snuffles
“ morning”; the Danish prefix iox departure is bort-.

Perish the Dane. — Weather to perish the Danes — very cold
weather. Here Dane suggests “ Dean ” (pronounced in
the Irish manner) ; a recall of the “ Swift ” motif. The
word “ chapter ” naturally ensues.

Atramental. — Detrimental plus “ dark ” (c. f. atrabilious).

Sotisfiction. — Satisfaction plus “ so ’tis fiction

Eithou. — I — thou : either.

I earnst... — A sneeze is coming — Schue ! — Germanically
antithetic to “ my hat ”, and he foreshortens his menda-
cious “ 1 am in earnest ”.

THE REVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE
AND JAMES JOYCE

EUGENE JOLAS

THE REVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE
AND JAMES JOYCE

Eugene Jolas.

The real metaphysical problem today is the word. The
epoch when the writer photographed the life about him with
the mechanics of words redolent of the daguerreotype, is
happily drawing to its close. The new artist of the word has
recognized the autonomy of language and, aware of the
twentieth century current towards universality, attempts to
hammer out a verbal vision that destroys time and space.

When the beginnings of this new age are seen in perspective,
it will be found that the disintegration of words, and their
subsequent reconstruction on other planes, constitute some of
the most important acts of our epoch. For in considering
the vast panorama of the written word today, one is struck
with the sensation of its endless and monotonous repetit»
iousness. Words in modern literature are still being set side
by side in the same banal and journalistic fashion as in pre-
ceding decades, and the inadequacy of worn-out verbal patterns
for our more sensitized nervous systems seems to have
struck only a small minority. The discovery of the subcon-
scious by medical pioneers as a new field for magical explor-
ations and comprehensions should have made it apparent that

the instrument of language in its archaic condition could no
longer be used. Modern life with its changed mythos and
transmuted concepts of beauty makes it imperative that words
be given new compositions and relationships.

James Joyce, in his new work published serially in transit-
ion, has given a body blow to the traditionalists. As he
subverts the orthodox meaning of words, the upholders of
the norm are seized by panic, and all those who regard
the English language as a static thing, sacrosanct in its posit-
ion, and dogmatically defended by a crumbling hierarchy of
philologists and pedagogues, are afraid. Epithets such as
“the book is a nightmare,” “disgusting, distorted rubbish,”
“ a red-nosed comedian, ” “ senile decay of the intellect, ”
“ utterly bad, ” etc., have been poured on the author and his
work.

In a recent essay in the Criterion entitled “ Style and the
Limitations of Speech, ” Mr. Sean O’Faolain attempts to
dispose of the Joycian onslaught by examining the nature of
language and its limitations, and he arrives at the remarkable
stand-pat conclusion of the “ immobility of English. ” Mr.
O’Faolain states among other things : “ There are real limit-
ations to the eloquence of words. These are mainly two,
despite the overteeming richness of what we do possess, our
vocabulary is not of our manufacture and it is limited : and
meanwhile, liberty to invent, and add to, and replace, is
absolutely denied us — denied us, as it would seem, for all
time. ” Mr. O’Faolain, basing his conclusions on a dessic-
ated philosophy of historicism, rejects Mr. Joyce’s language
as “ a-historic, ” and chides him for running counter to
certain eternal laws of nature.

Again, in a review of Anna Livia Plurabelle (Ivhh States-
man, Dublin) after examining a phrase beginning with :

“ She was just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing
etc., ” and after indicating that Mr. Joyce’s system had col-
lapsed, because he (the reader) was unable to penetrate the
meaning of certain neologisms, Mr. O’Faolain concludes that
this language is “ almost music ” and serves no useful pur)
pose. The sentence he quotes, (from page 21 of A. L. P.-
contains the word silvamoonlake ” which he analyses.
This mental exercise ends in the recognition of silva as being
in relation to silver and sylva, moon as being moon, and lake
as being lake. That is already something, although lake
should also be understood to have some relation to a lacteal,
or milky, image (cf. P. 24 A. L. P. the Petrarca Laura allus-
ion, “ By that Vale Vowclose’s lucydlac, etc. ”). He stumbles
against the neologism “ forstfellfoss. ” This means nothing
to him. Now the word “ foss, ” which puzzles him more
than “ forst ” and “ fell, ” — although the real meaning of
“ forst ” has also escaped him, it being indicative of tree —
is rather well known to students of geography. It is a geo-
graphical and topographical term which my Baedeker readily
reveals to me. Under the heading of World’s Biggest Wat-
erfalls, I discover, not only Niagara Falls (170 m high) but
Feigumfoss in Norway (656 m. high). I also find other falls
in Norway bearing the generic ending of foss : Esplansfoss,
Grandefoss, Hoenefoss, Stalheimsfoss, and many others. It
has been a custom for some time to admit to English citi-
zenship such geographical and topographical terms as : pampa,
(ice) berg, spa, fjord, campagne, steppe, veldt, lock, savannah,
geyser, maelstrom, lande, canyon, etc. Mr. O’Faolain will
probably object that he is not supposed to know Scandinavian
in order to understand a work of English literature. But it is
equally apt to say that a knowledge of Latin and Greek, and a
light smattering of other languages, is no longer sufficient in an

age that is rapidly coming to a complete internationalization
of the spirit.

Let it be understood once and for all that we can no longer
accept the ideas of a past epoch. We are not interested in
romantic ^"passe-ism, ” nor in infantile parallelisms.

The most cursory glance at the evolution of English, or
other languages, shows that speech is not static. It is in a
constant state of becoming. Whether the organic evolution
of speech is due to external conditions the people themselves
bring about, or whether it is due to the forward-straining
vision of a single mind, will always remain a moot question.
I imagine there is an element of both working simultaneously
at this process. Renan once accused Saint-Paul of ‘‘ audac-
iously violating, if not the genius of the Greek language, at
least the logic of human language. ” The reason for Saint-
PauFs heresy lies in the fact, — as pointed out by the Rev.
Marcel Jousse — that he tried to follow the laws of spoken
human language. There is no logical reason why the trans^
mutation of language in our day should not be as legitimate as
it was throughout the ages. While painting, for instance,
has proceeded to rid itself of the descriptive, has done away
with the classical perspective, has tried more and more to
attain the purity of abstract idealism, and thus led us to a
world of wondrous new spaces, should the art of the word
remain static ? Is it not true that words have undergone rad_
ical changes throughout the centuries ? Should James Joyce,
whose love of words and whose mastery of them has been
demonstrated in huge creations, be denied the right (which
the people themselves hold) to create a vocabulary which is
not only a deformation, but an amalgamation of all the
languages in the so-called English-speaking world ? The
English language, after all, has been an amalgamation trom

the very beginning of its existence. Why should the uni-
lingual Englishman feel worried , when in the British Isles
alone, there are five languages still in common use: Manx,
English, Irish, Gaelic and Welsh I With what right can the
‘ ‘ unilingual ” Englishman demand that the well of the English
language remain undefiled ? It is a very muddy well, at
best.

But, says Mr. O’Faolain “ a word is a fragment of history
that we have agreed to accept as a symbol for a limited number
of its own experiences and ours, and the writer works with
these experiences and our knowledge of them ; as a result,
words become in his hands most pliable, roguish and sug-
gestive things. ” To illustrate his point he chooses the word
“ gentleman. ’’ This example seems to me inept. If he
wishes to show that words do not change, then “gentleman”
does not show it. But to show that they do change, let us
take “ title, ” for example. The Latin word is “ titulus ”
which is the cross on top of the letter “ t. ” INRI was a
“ titulus” for the cross of Christ. There is even a feastday
of that name in the Roman Catholic Church. To the lawyer
a “ title ” represents the authenticity of a document repre-
senting an heir’s succession. When an American society girl
marries a duke or a marquis, she is marrying a “ title. ”.
Then “ title ” also indicates the descriptive term for a work
of literature. For Gene Tunney, the word “ title ” represents
the honor he received, after Mr. Jack Dempsey had seen the
starry firmament. Etc., etc.

While Mr. Joyce, beginning with Ulysses, and now in his
still unnamed work, has been occupied in exploding the
antique logic of words, analogous experiments have been
made in other countries. In France, Germany and Italy, the
undermining process has been going on for the past fifteen

years. In order to give language a more modern elasticity,
to give words a more compressed meaning through disassoci-
ation from their accusomed connections, and to liberate the
imagination with primitivistic conceptions of verbs and
nouns, a few scattered poets deliberately undertook to disin-
tegrate their own speech.

Leon-Paul Fargue, one of the great French poets of our
age, has created astonishing neologisms in his prose poems.
Although retaining much of the purity of French, he has
slashed syllables, transposed them from one word to ano-
ther, built new words from root vocables and thus introduced
an element entirely unknown before into French literature.
The large place he leaves to the dream as a means for verbal
decomposition adds piquancy to his work. When, in Tumulte,
he says: Enclochez-vous dans I’alveole ”, no dictionary

will give you the meaning of enclocher. Nor is the English
translation, “ enbell yourselves, ” anything but a neologism.
He says : “ Te voila, zoizonin,” which might be translated
by “ lilbirdie, ” but which is a pure invention of his own.
Consider also the phrase : “ Anatole, tanaos et thanatos,
anthropofrime, ” etc. Or: “ un vieux bee de gaz couronne,
noir paponcle, ” which was translated in transition by: “ an
old crowned gas lamp, black papuncle. ”

The revolution of the surrealists, who destroyed complete-
ly the old relationships between words and thought, remains
of immense significance. A different association of words
on planes of the spirit makes it possible for these poets to
create a universe of beauty the existence of which was never
suspected before. Michel Leiris in his experimental Glossaires
departs radically from academic ideas and presents us with
a vocabulary of iconoclastic proportions. M. Leiris stated
at one time : “ A monstruous aberration makes men believe

that language is born to facilitate their mutual relations.
With usefulness as an aim, they prepare dictionaries, in which
words are catalogued and given a well-defined meaning
(so they think) based on custom and etymology. Now,
etymology is a perfectly vain science that gives no infor-
mation whatsoever about the veritable meaning of a word,
i.e. the particular significance, the personal significance which
everybody must give it, according to the pleasure of his spirit.
As for custom, it is unnecessary to say that it is the lowest crit-
erion one might apply. ’’Andre Breton, demoralizing the old
psychic processes by the destruction of logic, has discovered a
world of magic in the study of the dream via the Freudian
explorations, and he has insisted on expressing those inte-
rior currents with new words or word associations.

Miss Gertrude Stein attempts to find a mysticism of the
word by the process of thought thinking itself. She does
not deform the word as such, but gives it new sensations by
giving it its mathematical power. Of late she has been trying
to develop a new sense of grammar.

Verbal neologisms were first attempted in Germany by
August Stramm. Here is one of his poems :

Abendgang

Durch sclimiege Nacht

Sdmeigt iinser Schritt dahin

Die Haende bangen blass iim krampfes Graiien

De?' Schem sticht scharf in Schatten unser Haupt

In Schatten

U ns I

I loch flimmt der Stern

Die Pappel haengt herauf
Und

Hebt die Erde nach

Die schlafe Erde armt den nackten Himmel

Du schaust und schauerst

Deine Lippen duensten

Der Himmel kuesst

Und

Uns gebaert der Kuss !

While Stramm limited himself to the problem of re-recre-
ating nouns as verbs and adjectives, Hans Arp, who is really
a Frenchman, played havoc with the lyric mind by inventing
word combinations set against a fantastic ideology.

Certain others went so far as to reproduce gestures only by
word symbols. These, however, remained mostly sound
paroxysms. Very little can be said also for the futuristic
theory of “ words in liberty.” It did not solve the problem »
since it ignored the psychic contents of poetry. Because a
work of art is primarily a vision expressed through rhythm,
Marinetti’s idea, insisting on movement as the sole criterion
of expression, remains abortive.

James Joyce has independently found his solution. The
texture of his neologies is based on a huge synthesis. There
is a logic of his own back of every innovation. The root
of his evolution can be traced to Ulysses. There, already,
Mr. Joyce contemplated the disintegration of words. In the
interior monologue words became disjointed from their
traditional arrangements, and new possibilities for timbre
and associations were discovered. In developing his medium
to the fullest, Mr. Joyce is after all doing only what Shakes-
peare has done in his later plays, such as The Winter's Tale

and Cymbeline, where the playwright obviously embarked
on new word sensations before reaching that haven of peace-
fulness mirrored in the final benediction speech from the
latter play which closes the strife of tongues in Ulysses.
Let us consider, for example, the following quotations
from Cymbeline, selected at random throughout the play.

Sec. Gent. You speak him far

First Gent. I do extend him, sir, within himself ;

Crush him together, rather than unfold
His measure duly.

Imo. Thou shouldst have made him

As little as a crow, or less, ere left
To after-eye him.

Pis. Madam, so I did.

Imo. I would have broke mine eye-strings ; crackM them, but
To look upon him ; till the diminution
Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle.

Imo. What is the matter, trow

lack. The cloyed will,

That satiate yet unsatisfied desire, that tub
Both filPd and running, ravening first the lamb,

Longs after for the garbage.

Post

Tis still a dream ; or else such stuff as madmen
Tongue, and brain not :

lack

For beauty that made barren the swelFd boast

Of him that best could speak ; for feature, laming
The shrine of Venus, or straight-pight Minerva,

Postures beyond brief nature ; for condition,

A shop of all the qualities that man

Loves woman for ; besides, that hook of wiving.

Fairness which strikes the eye.

Post Then began

a stop i^ the chaser, a retire ; anon
A rout, confusion-thick : forthwith they fly
Chickens, the way which they stooped eagles ; slaves.

The strides they victors made : and now our cowards.

Like fragments in hard voyages, became
The life o’ the need :

In connection with this last quotation, it is interesting to
compare the effect of haste and confusion of the battle with
a similar passage from Work in Progress, the description of
the Battle of Waterloo in the opening pages.

“ This is lipoleums in the rowdy howses. This is the Willing-
done, by the splinters of Cork, order fire. Tonnerre ! (Bullsear !
Play !) This is camelry, this is floodens, this is panickburns. This
is Willingdone cry. Brum ! Brum ! Cumbrum ! This is jinnies
cry. Underwetter ! Ghoat strip Finnlambs ! This is jinnies rinn-
ing away dowan a bunkersheels. With a trip on a trip on a trip on
a trip so airy, etc. ”

Then there are the coinages of words to be found in
Cymbeline such as, “ cravens ”, “ after-eye ”, “ dmperceive-
rant ”, “ straight-pight ”, “ chaffless ”, “ whoreson ”,
“ under-peep ”, “ wrying”, etc.

Needless to say, had Shakespeare employed precisely the
same innovations as Mr. Joyce, the quarrel would have long

since died down, Mr. Joyce’s course to-day would be plain
sailing and his role that of the imitator rather than the innov-
ator. In all the examples cited, however, there is an easily
recognizable analogy in the very personal, almost obscure
intention of the artist, which makes no concessions to
communication other than a tantalizing invitation to the
reader to seek and continue to seek, if he would know the
complete thought behind earth phrase ; and in Joyce’s work
there are at least bits of recognizable drift-wood floating on
the surface of the stream, which is not the case in the Shakes-
peare quotations, where the reader’s cue lies deep and well
hidden under the word flow.

James Joyce gives his words odors and sounds that the
conventional standard does not know. In his super-tempo-
ral and super-spatial composition, language is being born
anew before our eyes. Each chapter has an internal rhythm
differentiated in proportion to the contents. The words are
compressed into stark, blasting accents. They have the tempo
of the Liffey itself flowing to the sea. Everything that the
world of appearance shows, everything that the automatic life
shows, interests him in relation to the huge philosophic and
linguistic pattern he has undertaken. The human element
across his words becomes the passive agent of some strange
and inescapable destiny.

Those who have heard Mr. Joyce read aloud from Work
in Progress know the immense rhythmic beauty of his
technique. It has a musical flow that flatters the ear, that
has the organic structure of works of nature, that transmits
painstakingly every vowel and consonant formed by his ear.
Reading aloud the following excerpt may give an idea of
this :

“ Shall we follow each others a steplonger whiles our liege

is taking his refreshment ? There grew up beside you amid
our orisons of the speediest in Novena Lodge, Novara Ave-
nue, in fltwaspriduum-am-Bummel oaf, outofwork, one remo-
ved from an unwashed savage, on his keeping and in yours,
that other, Immaculatus, that pure one, he who was well
known to celestine circles before he sped aloft, a chum of the
angels, a youth they so tickerly wanted as gamefellow that
they asked his mother for little earps brupper to let him tome
to Tintertarten, pease, and hing his scooter ’long and ’tend
they were all real brothers in the big justright home where
Dodd lives, that mother smothered model, that goodlooker
with not a flaw whose spiritual toilettes were the talk of half
the town, and him you laid low with one hand one fine May
in the Meddle of your Might, your bosom foe (not one did
you slay, no, but a continent!), to find out how his innard
worked !”

The English language, because of its universality, seems
particularly fitted for a re-birth along the lines envisaged by
Mr. Joyce. His word formations and deformations spring
from more than a dozen foreign languages. Taking as his
physical background the languages spoken in the British
Empire, past and present (Afrikaans-Dutch : South-Africa ;
French : Canada; etc.) he has created a language of a certain
bewilderment, to be sure, but of a new richness and power
for those who are willing to enter into the spirit of it. Even
modern American, so fertile in astonishing anarchic pro-
perties, has been used by him. The spontaneous flux of
his style is aided by his idea to disregard the norms of ortho-
dox syntax. Using the pun, Mr. Joyce has succeeded in giv-
ing us numerous felicitous tournures in spite of the jeers of
the professors. Did not the New Testament itself use puns
in order to put over an idea ? “ Tu es Petrus, et super hanc

petrum aedificabo ecclesiam meam,” which is used in the first
book, provides certainly a sufficiently good precedent.

For it is the condition between waking and sleeping as well
as sleep itself which James Joyce is presenting to us in his
monumental work. Here for the first time in any literature,
the attempt is successfully made to describe that huge world
of dreams, that a-logical sequence of events remembered or
inhibited, that universe of demoniacal humor and magic
which has seemed impenetrable so far. (To be sure, Gerhardt
Hauptmann in Hannele’s Himmelfahrt attempted to present
a dream-state, but it remained bound in the old literary
conceptions as far as the actual expression was concerned).
The dynamics of the sleep-mind is here presented with an
imagination that has whirled together all the past, present
and future, as well as every space related to human and inor-
ganic evolution.

But in developing this theme, Joyce realized that the ele-
ments of sleep have never been properly described as far as
the real night language is concerned. Obviously we do not
use the same words while asleep as those we employ when
awake. If you make the experiment of transcribing the nar-
rative events of your dream, you will forever be confronted
with this difficulty. Every writer who has tried to commun-
icate his dreams to us has stumbled against the inadequacy
of his presentational or verbal medium. For the broken im-
ages of the dream floating through a distorted film and the
actual mechanics of words that Occur in the movement need
a radically new attitude.

James Joyce has given us this solution, and his language
corresponds to this need. Listen to “ Father Viking Sleeps,”
the physiological description of sleep in Work in progress :

“ Liverpoor? Sot a bit of it ! His braynes coolt parritch.

his pelt nassy, his heart’s adrone, his bluidstreams acrawl,
his puff but a piff, his extremeties extremely so Humph is in
his doge. Words weigh no more to him than raindrips to
Rothfernhim. Which we all like. Rain. When we sleep.
Drops. But wait until our sleeping. Drain. Sdops ”

I DONT KNOW WHAT TO CALL IT BUT
ITS MIGHTY UNLIKE PROSE

VICTOR LLONA

I DONT KNOW WHAT TO CALL IT BUT ITS
MIGHTY UNLIKE PROSE

Victor Llona.

Among so many other things, what we have seen so far of
Work in Progress appears to be a « divertissement philologi-
que », if I may borrow the pat expression of a lover of such
entertainments, M. Valery Larbaud. A glittering, mysterious
show, ringing with laughter, yet somber, poetic, and fund-
amentally sad, like all the spectacles born of an artist’s dis-
enchanted brains.

A vast company of actomords — not only of the English,
but of many languages, both dead and alive — cavort here in
a whirlwind dramatic ballet to a polyphonic orchestral
accompaniment, while the eyes of the audience are dazzled
and soothed in turns by a display of colours which runs the
gamut of a lavish palette. Each one a character in costume
— some recognizable at first sight, others inscrutable in a
novel garb, perhaps a wilful deformation of their lawful
vestment — these words skip and prance, shout, lisp, sing or
speak their lines, flit like birds of ravishing or disconcerting
plumage in and out of the purposely darkened stage, while
multicoloured beams of light play intermittently upon the

boards flashing upon a fragmentary scene, disclosing a stiff'
tableau vivant, or affording a glimpse of some sprightly cava-
lier seul suspended in mid-air, only to turn away from him
at once, so that we shall never know whether the bold per-
former did land upon his feet or break his neck at the end of
his pirouette.

To increase our mystification, the virtuoso stage director
sends in at times his words by pairs or trios, so interlocked
and arbitrarily matched, that we are puzzled at first, as though
we saw some three-headed monster, never before beheld. We
scrutinize the phenomenon, level our lorgnettes, crane our
necks and peer at the freaks. Why, it’s only a German root
sandwiched in between two stolid English monosyllables, or
perhaps a vagrant Portuguese noun marshalled up for our
judgment between two French gendarmes.

* *

To venture an opinion on the other aspects of Mr. Joyce’s
latest work would be premature. Yet those aspects no doubt
are the essential ones. The problem of style, for instance.
One cannot help but feel that this new work will advance the
technique of writing far beyond the point where it has been
marking time since the publication of Ulysses, Another
aspect is the mode of presentation of the story — or rather of
the prose epic. Another yet the fine restraint with which a
stupendous erudition is made use of to give colour, body and
perspective without ever being allowed to intrude purely as
encyclopaedic matter — a true miracle of artistry.

Whatever may be the ultimate scope of the work — possibly
a panoramic view of human story — the fragments we have
so far are gigantic. Given the perfectly balanced craftsmans-

hip of Mr. Joyce, the size and density of the parts are a sure
indication as to the proportions of the whole.

* *

The handling of language by Mr. Joyce presents such
obvious innovations, that it has drawn the attention of the
critics almost to the exclusion of all the other features of his
new work. Here criticism is entirely permissible, for surely
the clues we have so far may serve to give us an insight into
what is to follow.

The embodiment of foreign words into a given language
is by no means a new departure. The practice has been, and
still is, resorted to, both spontaneously by the people and
deliberately by the writers, especially at such times when the
language has reached a point in its development where it
must be fashioned into a literary vehicle, or when it sorely
needs rejuvenating. In other words, both when the language
is born to artistic expression, and when it has to be given,
artificially, a fresh lease of life.

But never was the procedure indulged in on such a scale,
with such determination — so radically, in such a revolution-
ary manner.

*■

* *

Rabelais, to whom Mr. Joyce bears much more than a sur-
face likeness, did it. The father of French prose literally
coined hundreds of neologisms, of which an astounding
number are still heartily alive. A proof that language can be
made by a writer ^ .

I . Cf. for their similarity and difference Rabelais’ account of the siege of
Corinth by Philip of Macedon (book III, prologue): “ Les ungs, des champs

On the other hand, in order to coin his neologisms, Rabe-
lais drew mostly from Latin and from Greek — a little (vic-
ariously) from Hebrew and Arabic — but I have never seen
an instance when he forged compound words made up of
foreign roots or syllables pieced together with roots and
fragments of French words — which seems to be the most
startling innovation in Mr. Joyce’s handling of the English
language.

Rabelais’ daring never went so far as that. Perhaps this
artifice never occurred to him. Perhaps there were other reas-
ons for this reticence on the part of one who dared so much.
First of all, the author of Gargantua was French and used
French, his own language by right of birth, for which he had
perhaps a much greater reverence than Mr. Joyce, an Irishman
of revolutionary tendencies (in literature, at least), could pos-
sibly entertain for the King’s English. Another — and
perhaps weightier — reason, is that the French tongue, at the
time Rabelais used it, was still in the formative period. It
was a sturdy infant — as sturdy a baby as Gargantua himself
— not the worn out methuselah we have with us today.

es fotteresses retiroyent meubles, bestail, grains, vins, fruictz ”, and so on,
an account itmpedimented with military baggage from several [plundered lan-
guages, with the description of the Great Dublin Duke (Cf. the account of
the battle of Waterloo, Transition I, p. 14) : “ This is the big Sraughter Wil-
lingdone, grand and magentic in his goldtin spurs and his ironed dux and his
quarterbrass woodysyhoes and his magnate’s gharters and his bangkok’s best
and goliar’s goloshes and his pulloponeasyan wartrews. ” Where the hero
stands horsed under a seven cubit “ arc de triomphe en ciel ” signed by words
of power and battle.

In a Life of Rabelais which the writer of this essay is now preparing, he
endeavours to analyse in detail this fascinating subject of the literary, imagin-
ative and suggestive handling of language in metamorphosis or in a transi-
tional stage — a problem which today is as urgent as it was in Rabelais’ age.

Consequently no such drastic innovations were required to
give life and zest to Rabelais’ vehicle of expression.

To these reasons may be added a third. Prof. Sainean, in
his enlightening work, Le Langage de Rabelais^ has proved
beyond discussion that Maistre Frangoys really knew very
little of the foreign languages of his day.

“ What strikes one ”, he says, “ when perusing the novel,
is the great number of idioms which are met with therein.
Some enthusiastic commentators have made of Rabelais the
greatest polyglot of the Renaissance.

“ This judgment must be toned down. This polyglottism
is but a purely literary contrivance. Our author really knew
only the classical tongues (Latin and Greek) and Italian. He
had but a pretty superficial smattering of Hebrew, and knew
nothing, like everybody else in his time, of Arabic and
Spanish, as well as of the idioms which are encountered here
and there in his work. ”

In this respect Mr. Joyce is far more learned than Rabelais.
His knowledge of foreign languages is as diversified as it is
sound. Italian he speaks like a native. German and French
he knows as well. He has better than a working practice in
Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages.
Words of seventeen tongues have been identified so far in his
new work — and every one of them is used with a surety of
touch that bespeaks more than a nodding acquaintance.

Yet what judgment may one pass on this widespread
weaving of extraneous threads into the fundamental language
of a literary work ? Does not the author take the erudition
of his readers too much for granted ? Perhaps he does not
care. To quote Stendhal’s “ mot ” in his Foreword to The
Memoirs of a Tourist :

“ Mr. L..., accustomed as he was to speak Spanish and

100

English in the colonies, had admitted many words of those
tongues (into his writing) as being more expressive.

“ ‘Expressive I no doubt’, I said to him, ‘but only for those
who know Spanish and English.’ ”

Here Stendhal talks like one of those pests, so numerous
among his countrymen, “ les hommes de bon sens None-
theless the crux of the matter is there. Mr. Joyce expects
too much from his readers. Few, if any, will possess the
knowledge of languages — and other sciences — that would
allow them fully to grasp the niceties of meaning in this
work.

However, he may point out, were he disposed to answer
such criticism, that in this departure he but anticipates the
trend of the times, which assuredly leans to a thorough inter-
nationalization in speech as in everything else. The world
today is not the restricted, insular province that it still was
in Stendhal’s time. The prodigious development of the
means of locomotion and of the means for spreading thought
has brought about a radical change in this provincialism, not
to mention the upheaval of the War, the like of which had
never been seen in the world on such a scale since the Barb-
aric invasions which marked the close of the Roman Empire.

* *

When completed, no doubt. Work in Progress will still
prove a hard nut to crack for the vast majority of its readers.
Mr. Joyce will suscitate a host of commentators who may in
some respects smooth the way for the vulgum pecus. These
scholars, as is their wont, will fight and squabble over
“ obscure ” passages, draw up glossaries and indulge in long-
winded dissertations as to the esoteric meaning of certain

lOI

fragments. But Rabelais was sufficiently understood during
his life-time, for he had launched his giants into a world of
true and tried readers. France, in the i6th century, con-
tained, I am sure, a greater proportion of educated men capable
of following him upon the roughest paths, than is the case
among the English-speaking public from whom Mr. Joyce
must expect to muster his followers.

Such commentators, however, would have tickled the risible
faculties of Rabelais enormously. I hope that Mr. Joyce will
live long enough to enjoy the fun of which his literary forbear
was so unfortunately deprived, for 1 suspect that the com-
mentaries of future critics of his new work will not lack in
amusing elements.

We would be better inspired if we made an honest effort
and tried to see the light by ourselves. Here and there 1
glimpse in Work in Pi'ogress certain gleams, furtive and
fleeting, I perceive certain recurring sounds which might give
a key to the secret. Thus in a kaleidoscope, the fragments
of coloured glass which form the apparently endless patterns
are few and in each fresh and unexpected pattern, we end
by identifying the constituting elements, detecting thus the
rhythm of the successive pictures. The work still in progress
might be of such design, and the difliculties it offers might
be less than it appears at first sight.

Mr. Joyce may have a surprise in store for us. His artistry
is so consummate that he may bring order out of apparent
chaos by a mere literary artifice. Up to the present, the
fragments that have appeared suggest the disordered, illogical
imagery of dreams, the babblings and mutterings of human
beings upon the brink of sleep. The dreamers may awake
and talk coherently — after their visions during slumber have
served to give us an insight into their subconscious souls.

102

These blurred speeches, moreover, may be intended to repres-
ent the Past.

I feel that with the last fragments shall come the revelation.

* *

To me, one of the most striking and illuminating thing in
connection with Work in Progress is that it has managed to
reverse the consecrated order of things. We commentators
simply could not be kept in leash — we had to have our say
in a volume which will grace the stalls in advance of the text
under consideration.

I should like to be told of another example of this out of the
history of literature.

Mr. JOYCE DIRECTS
AN IRISH WORD BALLET

ROBERT McALMON

Mr. JOYCE DIRECTS
AN IRISH WORD BALLET

Robert McAlmon.

In a period post-dating the admission of the subconscious
as important to individual and general human destinies, and
when an acceptance of relativity forces the realization that
facts and ideas are neither as hard nor as logical as some
minds wish them, it is natural that a literature should
emerge which is evocative rather than explanatory, more
intent upon composite types, plots, and situations, than on
particularized meanings. Had the inhabitants of the tower of
Babel sought for an esperanto language, their gropings would
have been, to be successful, into some composite subconscious
of individual and race types ; the language emerging might
readily have been a dance or a symphony of music, with
whatever evocations and implications the movements of a
ballet or the combinations of sound summoned to any
particular subconscious. The ability to respond to suggestion
varies greatly. However, music and the ballet are less
inhibited by the demands of meaning than literature has
been. Audiences do not insist upon a story or a situation to
appreciate the movements of a dance or the strains of music.
Critics allow that there can be a pure art in these mediums ;

io6

they have sometimes come to permit with painting, sculptur-
ing and architecture, that for evoking a pleasurable emotion
or sensation, form and colour does not have to be utilitarian,
descriptive, literal, or possessed of meaning other than the
intent to awaken response

Also good comedy, clowning, pantomine, nonsense, slap-
stick, drollery, does not appeal to the sense of humour by ex-
planation, but by gesture. In such good dances or music as
are humorous, it is rarely possible to define the reasons for the
comic appeal. Prose too can possess the gesticulative qua-
lity.

In Ulysses James Joyce made a summary of a good share
of the failure of the entire Christian era. Whether it was his
purpose or not, and it probably was not his intent, he dam-
ned intellectually the religious and metaphysical logics of
Jesuitism, emphatically, and of Christianity as a whole, gene-
rally, for the effects they had on him and his race and his real-
ization of what they have done to the emotions of people.
Having what has been called his “ detestable genius ” for
words, their intonations, connotations, and rhythms, he often
achieved orchestral effects with his prose, but the morale un-
derlying the book was such that it suited too perfectly the
morale of the time when it first appeared. Then, four years
after the war the world had come to an end ; there was an
end ; there had to be a new beginning ; and Joyce, realizing
since years that minds to not think in sentences, that the
subconscious does not think or feel in ideas, but in images,
and these images not consecutive or related to our as yet un-
scientific understanding of psychology, surely wished to break
though language to give it greater flexibility and nuance. To
him language does not mean the English language ; it means
a medium capable of suggestion, implication, and evocation ;

107

a medium as free as any art medium should be, and as the
dance at its best can be. Primitive tribes, particularly the
Indians of North America, know sign language as a means ot
communications ; African tribes, by drums, dances, and a
variety of gestures get their emotions across without the nec-
essary means of a common language. Isadora Duncan’s
dream of a dancing America, of masses of dancing figures, of
a populace released to fuller realizations because permitted to
express themselves individually in amass, no one much ques-
tions because she is dealing with the dance. As yet literature
is unfreed, because to most people it is bound up with the
idea of story telling, the drama of single lives or a group of
lives. It still is under the shadow of medieval philosophies,
religion, and reasoning, to such an extent that its scope is limi-
ted. Joyce, one judges, wishes to evolve a prose that deals
with human types, mytholgies, eruditions, and languages,
compositely.

In Anna Livia Plurabelle, which is written to suggest the
flowing of the river, it is hardly important that Mr. Joyce has
with great pains sought the names of all rivers on earth and
8 in hell, and heaven. Unless the satisfaction he himself gets
matters enough so that it transmits a satisfaction to the reader,
it does not appear significent that he sought for the word
peace in 29 languages so that he might call a composite female
character peace in 29 ways ; and similarly with ttmlight that
after much research he finds that in the Burmese there is only
the word Nyi-ako-mah-thi-ta-thi, which translates literally
into “ the time when younger brother meets elder brother,
does not recognize him but yet recognizes him ”. What is
important is the sensations evoked, the sensibilities made
susceptible to response, by his writing, and that necessarily
varies with each individual reader. The question “ but what

does it all mean ” need not be asked ; it means variously, to
Joyce himself and to each reader, as a Mozart, or a Beethoven
or a Strawinsky symphony means variously to different people
and variously to the same persons in various moods and
circumstances. Generally the new work in Progress with
which Mr. Joyce is now occupied is sprinkled with classical
allusions ; he may, at the time of writing, find a particular
passage that suggests to him a classical mythological figure,
a reminiscence of Dublin, an ironical crack at the works and
pomps of Catholicism, a sentimental thought about some
loved person of his present or past acquaintance, and again
a memory of Dublin. Dublin he cannot forget ;

“ What was thaas? Fog was whaas? Too mult sleepth.
Let sleepth.

“ But really now whenabouts. Expatiate then how much
times we live in. Yes ?

“ So not by night by naught by naket, in those good old
lousy days gone by, the days, shall we say? of whom shall
we say? while kinderwardens minded their twinsbed, there-
now theystood, the sycomores, all four of them, at their
pussy-corners, and their old time pallyollogass playing copers
fearsome, with Gus Walker, the cuddy, and his poor old
dying boosy cough, esker, Newcsele, Saggard, Crumlin, Dell
me, Donk, the way to Wumblin, Follow me beeline and
you’re Bumblin, Esker, Newscle, Saggard, Crumlin, and
listening, so gladied up when nicechild kevin Mary (who
was going to be commandeering chief of the choirboys’ brigade
the moment he grew up under all the auspices). Irishsmiled
in his milky way of cream dwibbleand onage tustard and des-
sed tabbage, frighted out when badbrat Jerry Goldophing (who
was hurrying to be cardinal scullion in anight refuge as soon
as he was cured enough under all the hospitals) furrinfrow-

109

ned down his wrinkly waste of methlated spirits ick and lemon-
choly lees ick and pulverised rhubarbarorum icky. ”

What the above passage means to Joyce I cannot say. To
me it means that he cannot forget Dublin, cannot forget
schooldays, and childhood. To a Dubliner it would mean
possibly more; but to me childhood memories, nightfears and
humours, weeping willows rather than sycamores, and a hac-
kingly coughing consumptive town drunkard are evoked, and
the suggestion of male pedagogues, monitors in a wet-the-bed
ward of a boarding school. He is not doing characterizations
of definite characters ; he is implying the being and having
been of types that are general to all times and places, and
according to the readers background do the composite charac-
ters suggested take on feature. He cannot forget Dublin, and
in his Irish tenor prose lemoncholy way he must sing or be
mumbling a Dublin Irish come-all-you in a wistful twilight
remembering occasionally Greece and her myths such as a
barber whispering to the rushes that Midas has golden ears,
or recalling that the twilight of madness descended on Swift.

“ Unslow, malswift, pro mean, proh noblesse, Atrahore,
melancolores, nears ; whose glauque eves glitt bedimmed to
imm ; whose fingrings creep o’er skull : till quench., asterr mist
calls estarr and graw, honath Jon raves homes glowcoma. ”
Inevitably swift madness (bad swiftness) mean and noble
the black hour black care sits behind the horseman (bringing
near) melancholy (black coloured sorrow) ; whose owlsighted
green eyes glimpse of reason or sight, bedimmed and bedam-
med by the fingers of incipient dementia creep o’er the skull
(crepuscle); till one star (asterr : Greek) in being quenched
names another star wench, estarr (German for blindness) and
graue (starr) (greenstar, glaucoma) grauestarr, cataract, grey,
shwarsz starr, for black and the dissolution of the retina.

But also, for Joyce, asterr is one of his composite female
characters, Esther Johnson, andEstarr is Hester Vanhomrigh,
and probably bethought of Astarte, as he thought with graw
of his glaucoma, approaching blindness, grey love is cold, he
remembers his love for words, for the quality which is ono-
matopoeic. And Honath Jon raves in a delirium of dreams
for the homes ot the star women, Stella and Vanessa, in this
passage compositely suggested hy quench, their homes sug-
gesting fireside and repose, the glow coma of repose.

It is unlikely that Joyce himself understands from a re-
reading of his present writing all that he thought it had in
the way of implication. So much as he is dealing with prose
for the evocative capacities which it possesses his psychology
and mythology are the renderings of his subconscious in the
hope of reaching an audience that responds pleasurably to
the implications of his involved orchestral theme. In the
above quoted passage the emotional impact of its meaning
could be the painful record of a subconscious quivering with
terrors as in a night crise, but by using the english language
only as a basis, while weaving in classic mythology, Ger-
man, latin, and French, words or rythms, he has managed
to depersonalize his emotions and situations sufficiently to
take the raw quivering of a suffering spirit out of the passage.
This manner he utilizes frequently. There is no telling what
languages he is using if one is not a person who knows eighty
languages and well. The extent of his erudition is wide, but
not so great as people sometimes assume it to be. ' He admits
to philological “ ragpicking ” because the great passion of
his life is words, their colours and implications ; he does not
intend to create a new literary esperanto, but he wishes to
originate a flexible language that might be an esperanto of
the subconscious and he wishes to believe that anybody

Ill

reading his work gets a sensation of understanding, which is
the understanding which music is allowed without too much
explanation. His readers who take him with least effort are
probably the younger generation, who have grown up with
machinery, the radio, the aeroplane, with psycholanalysis
enough accepted as a progressing study so that fewer laymen
swallow it hook and sinker, with relativity a theory that can
be accepted for the timebeing as was Newton’s in the past.
This generation may demand less explanation about the
meaning of meaning. Being well out of the period when
there was much argument about abstract art, cubisms, futu-
risms, and pure form, they may without bewilderment and
resentment, permit their sensibilities to remain open and
susceptible and capable of response to the implications of a
literature that is not a literature of escape, of interpretation, of
propaganda or reform, or of God or morality seeking. In Joyce
are the backgrounds of his race, his education, his subconscious
and conscious responses to mythology, poetry, metaphysics that
are mainly Jesuit, and from the source of his subconscious
flows the stream of his wish to evoke literary music, a ballet
of dancing words that suggest the clear line and mass form
which is the beauty quality that good art has. The river
may be flowing, or he may be wishing to summon up the
sounds ofnightor to awaken the emotions that night thoughts
bring. The symbol of the river flowing however is not the
important factor ; it can be too insularly insisted upon to the
extent of limiting the capacities for stimulating the reader’s
sensual-sensitive esthetic response to prose music ; and more,
what to Joyce the sounds of a river flowing evokes emotionally
may be quite other than the effect of riverflowing sounds
upon another person. But what these sounds bring into his
operating conscious from the scource of his subconscious

II2

can have gratifying implications tor that other person never-
theless. The Irish tenor prose sings on, deriving from classic
literature and mythology and religion. The stream of the sub-
conscious reveals itself, derived also from the sources, (always
mainly Dublinesque), of folklore and folksong, of Celtic
bards, of Celtic legends of slim maidens with dark hair and
lithe bodies and breasts, of laughter and the continual melan-
choly plaint of Celtic whimsy, fatalism, and the erratic shift
of mood. Church music sounds here, and the half remem-
bered refrain of a sentimental ballad of the 90’s breaks in to
be itself broken in upon by a barroom ballad or the ribald
refrain of a bawdy house song. Limericks are woven into
the Irish tenor wailings. No more than Joyce can forget
Dublin and Jesuitism and Irish homelife and family can he
resist his mania for playing with words and phrases, punning.
The gossip of housewives is suggested ; the chatter of lounging,
lazy, shiftless barroom and streetcorner politicians plays
through the prose. The preachings and moralizings of priests,
washerwomen, and parents, is woven into the pattern with
ironic taunts against pedantries and the manners of editorial
and newspaper writings ; the insistence upon the Dublin-a-
m ale-city with a woman either a respectable woman or a
bloody whore is less in this new work than it was in Ulysses,
and to that extent is older and more resigned. He cares less
now for ideas and situations except as a basis for using the
medium of prose as a medium for declaring his passion for
words and their suggestions.

In an as yet unpublished portion of the new work this is
a passage with a definite situation, but with the characters
composite, and in time without age, but of course the scene
must be Dublin since Joyce cannot forgive Dublin and the
Dublin of 1904, which was when he left it for the last time.

A time.

Act : Dumbshow.

Closeup.

Man with nightcap, in bed, fore. Woman. With Curl-
pins, hind. Discovered. Side point of view. First position
of harmony. Say : Eh ? Ha. Check action. Matt. Male
partly masking female. Man looking round, beastly expres-
sion, fishy eyes, exhibits rage. Business. Ruddy blond-
beer wig, gross build, episcopolian, any age. Woman, sit-
ting, looks at ceiling, haggish expression, peaky nose, exhibits
fear. Welshrabbit tint, turfi tuft, undersized, free kirk.
No age. Closeup. Play.

Cry off. Her move.

You have here Joyce’s intentness on making his characters
and his efiTects a composite evocation, of types, or of the sum-
marization of a kind of poetry sensation, movement, or a spe-
cies of act. In the rest of the scene nothing happens but the
Joycian conversation between the man and woman, man and
wife, and the crying of one of their two little boys. Jean qui
Rit and Jean qui Pleure. The woman goes to comfort the
weeping little boy. The man follows her to the hallway to
look on secretively. The mother, comforting the boy.

“ You were dreamed, dear. The pawdrag? The faw-
thrig ? Shoe. Hear are no phanthares in the room at all.
No bad faathern, dear one. Opop opap capallo, muy malin-
chily malchick. Gothgored father dowon followay tomollow
the lucky load to Lublin for make his thoroughbass gross-
man’s bigness. Take that two pieces big slap slap bold
honty bottomside pap pap pappa.

Li ne dorm is ?

— S ; Malbone dormas.

Kial li Krias nokte ?

Parolas infanete. S.

Sonly all in your imagination, dim. Poor little brittle ma-
gic nation, dim of mind. Shoe to me now, dear. Shoom
of me. While elvery stream winds seling on for to keep this
barrel of bounty rolling. ”

Here Joyce cannot forget childhood, parenthood, mother
affection and anxiety, but most ot all he cannot forget Dublin,
Lublin, the memory of a Dublin folksong punned at and
joked with, the lucky load to Lublin, the wage-earning father,
and Ireland, poor brittle little magic nation, dim of mind.
Ireland, little Jean qui Pleure, with Joyce crooning an Irish
tenor twilight refrain to comfort the weeping child who awa-
kes in fright from having had a bad nightmare. The mother
does not call little Jean a melancholy bad little chick. Joyce
is playing with language, English, Russian, and latin, in this
passage. The refrain of mother to child is all comforting, as
Joyce sees it, but after a time he sees he has given it other
implications. Gothgored father, perhaps a priest is praying
as the mother tells of the no bad faathern, dear one, who goes
the lucky load to Lublin for to make the family groceries,
while every silvery stream (elvery) winds sailing selling (se-
ling) on to keep the barrel of bounty rolling.

It is possibly necessary to “ trance ” oneself into a state of
word intoxication, flitting-concept inebriation, to enjoy this
work to the fullest. Surely the author himself has written in
a state of exaltation, where the mood is witty, comic, or glim-
mery tragic, according to the passage ; but the mood is only
indicated rather than stated, defined, and dwellingly insisted
upon. Whether Anna Livia is being a lithesome, taunting,
woodnymph of an irish lass, or a garrulous knotty old wash

woman, she is in theprocess of representing womankind, the
femalenesses of life ; and old man river, as a randy young
buck or as a rutty, fibrous, eternally impregnating aged male,
is representing the masculinities ; and the two are composi-
tes, not only of humanity, sexes, bi- , heter, and what have
you, but there is the attempt to suggest through the ebb and
flow of the prose the possibilities and relativities inherent in
existence.

To what extent the imaginary being, the common man, or
the common reader, can get a pleasurable sensation out of
reading this work, is difficult to say; but if there* is^ such a
being as the common man, he probably does not read much,
except detective tales or housemaid romances or the sporting
news. He probably does not care much for the dance in bal-
let form and disassociated from sex and story telling ; his res-
ponse to music is likely to be of the sort that what he is accus-
tomed to he believes he likes. But that common man, if a
simple and not too complex but healthily curious minded
man might be more capable than the precious esthete or crit-
ic of responding to the evocative and suggestive quality of a
literature. That imaginary “ common man ” may not have
been educated away from ability to respond directly, through
having learned academically what is art, or beauty, or style.
The common man ought to be as receptive as a sensitive
child, buttry and find him. In general it is not unlikely that
Mr. Joyce in his new work in progress summons too insistent-
ly and often the wonder emotions, the religious emotions,
that have in them presentments of death, intonations of fear
and despair, or a humour that is too mainly Dublin mascu-
line and Irish teasings. That however is his race quality ; he
has not escaped the twilight, nor the church ; he is still sum-
ming up an age which some people believe past and too allied

to the medieval age of hampering gods, prejudices, and uns-
cientific attitudes. Surely, nevertheless he has broken into
language and made it a medium much freer, more sensitive,
musical and flexible, while retaining a subject content still
meaty with psychologic, historic, and sociologic comprehen-
sions. He has become freed in a manner of metaphysical
pomposities such as dominated the ideas, religions, and appre-
hensions of many great talents of the Past. He has always
been free of the need to give messages to the world and his
fellowmen ; and it is his intentness upon his love for words
which has given him this freedom, very probably.

THE CATHOLIC

ELEMENT IN WORK IN PROGRESS

THOMAS McGREEVY

THE CATHOLIC

ELEMENT IN WORK IN PROGRESS

Thomas McGreevy

The technique of Mr. Joyce’s Work in Progress has prob-
ably been already sufficiently explained to give readers inter-
ested in serious literature a line of approach to it. Technique
is, of course, important always and there are still technical
aspects of the work the implications of which will continue
to interest the critic. It seems to me, for instance, to be note-
worthy as marking not a reaction from realism but the carrying
on of realism to the point where it breaks of its own volition
into fantasy, into the verbal materials of which realism,
unknown to the realists, partly consisted. This fantasy is
obviously richer than the fantasy of, say, Mr. Walter de la
Mare, which turns away from reality and takes refuge in a
childishness which at its best is no more than charming.
Perhaps the best justification for the technique of Work in
Progress, however, was that implied in the phrase of the late
President of the English Royal Academy of Art at the 1928
Academy Banquet in London (See The Observer, May
1928). “ There are ”, he said, “ examples in our language

so perfect in their beauty and fitness that one feels they

120

cannot have been formed out of a language already fixed but
that a language had been created in order that they may
emerge. ” I do not know whether Sir Frank Dicksee had
Work in Progress in mind when he was speaking. I
scarcely think it likely. But evidently he might have. For
Mr. Joyce has created a language that is necessary precisely
to give beauty and fitness to his new work.

It is well to remember, however, that the beauty and
fitness are the important things and technical considerations
may be put aside for a moment in order to consider Work In
Progress from the point of view of other beauties and
fitnesses than verbal ones. Obviously, the book being still
unfinished, one may not yet say that it is marked by beauty
and fitness as a whole. But every chapter and passage that
has appeared is so admirably realised and so related to every
other chapter and passage that one has no doubts that when
the end does come the author of Ulysses will have justified
himself again as a prose writer who combines a wellnigh
flawless sense of the significance of words with a power to
construct on a scale scarcely equalled in English literature
since the Renaissance, not even by the author of Paradise
Lost. The splendour of order, to use Saint Thomas’s phrase,
has not been the dominating characteristic of modern English
prose and it is partly because the quality was demonstrated
on a vast scale in Ulysses that that book marked a literary
revolution. And signs are not absent that, in spite of the
difficulty of having to invent a new language as he writes,
Mr. Joyce in his latest work has lost nothing of his amazing
power in this direction.

That the conception of the story as a whole is influenced
by the Purgatorio and still more by the philosophy of Vico
is well known. Mr. Joyce is a traditionalist, a classicist.

I2I

That is why he is regarded as a revolutionary not only by
the academic critics but by those of the fervidly scientific
advanced school whose attitude towards the biology of words
is not what, if they were consistent, they ought to wish it to
be. The deep-rooted Catholicism of Ulysses was what most
upset the pastiche Catholicism of many fashionable critics in
England. The enthusiastic converts who discover the surface
beauties of Catholicism at the older universities, temporary”
Catholics one might call them, tend always to be shocked by
the more profound “ regular ” Catholicism of Ireland. And
one remembers the difficulties of even the true born English
Catholic Bishop Ullathorne in trying to keep the over
enthusiastic converts Newman and Manning in order. To
an intelligent Irishman and to Mr. Joyce least of all, Cathol-
icism is never a matter of standing on one leg. It is not a
pose, it is fundamental. Consequently it has to face
everything.

But the temporary Romanizers were as shocked by the
unsavoury element in Ulysses as a sentimental Saracen of
the middle ages might have been by the way in which Dante
put popes in hell (compare, incidentally, the introduction of
the phantoms of the Catholic and Church of Ireland primates
into the night-town scene in Ulysses). Again Irish Catholics
are not shocked by finding amongst the detail in the superb
monogram page (jChristi autem generatio) of the Book of
Kells two rats tearing the Host from each other with their
teeth. They face the fact, as the monk who painted the page
faced it, that devilry exists. The Introibo ad altare diaboli
with its response To the devil which hath made glad my
young days intoned by Father Malachi O’Flynn and The
Reverend Mr. Love in Ulysses should be taken in exactly
the same spirit as the rats in the work of the monk. But an

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English Catholic critic writing of Ulysses wanted it all to be
like the passage relating to the chanting of the Creed :

The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen’s memory the
triumpn of their brazen bells : et unam sanctam catholicam
et apostolicam ecclesiam ; the slow growth and change of
rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of
stars. Symbol of the Apostles in the Mass for Pope Marcellus,
the voices blended, singing alone aloud in affirmation : and
behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant
disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies
fleeing with mitres awry : Photius and the brood of mockers
and Arius, warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of
the Son with the Father and Valentine spurning Christ’s
terrene body and the subtle heresiarch Sabellius who held

that the Father was Himself His own Son idle mockery.

The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind : a
menace, a disarming and a worsting from those embattled
angels of the Church, Michael’s host who defend her ever in
the hour of conflict with their lances and shields.

He went on glibly to say, “ it is a case of corruptio optimi
pessima and a great Jesuit-trained talent has gone over
malignantly and mockingly to the powers of evil ”. He pre-
sumably rejects and would eliminate the rats from the Book
of Kells, the gargoyles from the thirteenth century cathedrals
of all Europe.

Actually, it is worth while to note, malignance and mockery
are precisely the things that are absent in Ulysses. In this
inferno from which Stephen is ever trying spiritually to
escape, for he, unlike the Jewish Bloom, knows the distinction
between the law of nature and the law of grace and is in
revolt against the former however unable he be to realise the
latter even the most obscene characters are viewed with a
Dantesque detachment that must inevitably shock the

123

inquisitorially minded. These do not notice that as Stephen
leaves after having put out the light on the scene that
revolted him by smashing the chandelier the Voice of All the
Blessed is heard calling :

Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth !

The inquisitorially minded I hasten to add however, exist in
Ireland as well as in England. We in Ireland have been,
though only to a relatively slight extent, affected, first during
the Penal times when our priests had to be educated abroad,
by French Jansenism and the orientally fanatical Catholicism
of Spain and later during the nineteenth century by our
political association with the censorious Nonconformity of
England. We are even now founding an Inquisition in
Dublin though one may believe that it is not likely to be a
very successful obstacle to the self-expression of a people who
with fewer pretensions have a sense of a larger tradition than
that of the half-educated suburbans who initiated the idea of
a new censorship. These latter understand no more than
the enthusiastic converts who lay down the law to nobler
ment han themselves in England that Catholicism in litera-
ture has never been merely lady-like and that when a really
great Catholic writer sets out to create an inferno it will be
an inferno. For Ulysses is an inferno. As Homer sent his
Ulysses wandering through an inferno of Greek mythology
and Virgil his Aeneas through one of Roman mythology so
Dante himself voyaged through the inferno of the mediaeval
Christian imagination and so Mr. Joyce sent his hero through
the inferno of modern subjectivity. The values are not
altered but because Mr. Joyce is a great realist it is the most
real of all — one notes for instance that the Voice of All the
Damned is the Voice of All the Blessed reversed, a realistic

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and understandable effect (c. f. Dante’s mysterious and not
altogether intelligible “ Pape Satan, pape Satan aleppe... ”)
— and it is as terrible and pitiful as any.

The purgatorial aspect of Work in Progress is most
obvious, of course, in the purgatorial, transitional language
in which it is written. This language is adequate to the
theme. Purgatory is not fixed and static like the four last
things, death, judgment, heaven and hell. The people there
are not as rooted in evil — or, for Dante or for Mr. Joyce,
even in personality — as the people in the inferno. And
therefore for literary purposes, not in definitive language
either. In Work in Progress the characters speak a language
made up of scraps of half the languages known to mankind.
Passing through a state of flux or transition they catch at
every verbal, every syllabic, association. Is it not natural
that in such circumstances without irreverence — on the
contrary indeed — Qui Tecum vivit et regnat should become
for one of them Quick takeum whiffat and drainit and that In
the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost
should become In the name of the former and of the latter
and of their holocaust. The former is surely the Eternal, the
latter the world and the holocaust the world consumed by
fire as pre-ordained from eternity.

Then there is a politically purgatorial side to the work
dominated by the figure, intermediate from every point of
view, of the Anglo-Irishman, Earwigger, Persse O’Reilley.
And there is, perhaps, the personal purgatory of the author.
I imagine — though it is an interpretation of my own that the
writer himself is suggested in that transitional stage of self-
realisation when he was still James Joyce the musician who,
to find himself finally as an artist, had to become James
Joyce the writer. All through his work it is evident that

125

Mr. Joyce never loses sight of the fact that the principality of
hell and the state of purgatory are in life and by the law of
nature not less within us than the kingdom of heaven. The
questions of the law of grace triumphant and of a modern
Paradiso will probably be more appropriately raised in some
years’ time.

Vico is the imaginative philosopher, the Dante, of the
Counter Reformation, little known though there is a road
bearing the Neapolitan name in Norwegian Dalkey, a suburb
ot Dublin. The conception at the back of Work in Progress
is influenced by the Vico theory of the four stages of human
society’s evolution. But the working out of the parallel
between the Vico conception and the reconstruction of it in
regarding Dublin’s life history in Work in Progress must
wait till the complete work has appeared. The thunder clap,
in Vico’s system, the most dramatic manifestation to prim-
itive man of a supreme, incalculable being is there in Part I,
however, and students of Vico will be able as the work moves,
to completion to recognise the second third and fourth of the
Neapolitan’s main ideas, marriage according to the auspices,
the burial of the dead and divine providence in the other parts
of it. They may be taken as comically foreshadowed in the
childish sing-song repeated in one of the chapters that have
already appeared, “ Harry me, marry me, bury me, bind me”-

Coming thus to less vast considerations there are details of
the work which, in their beauty and fitness are unsurpassed
even by the finest things in Ulysses. As characters, the
mysterious viking father of Dublin — Dublin was founded
by the “ Danes ” — and his hustru (woman of the house),
the wayward Anna Livia, the river Liffey, Dublin’s mother,
stand out above all, in some ways more than any of the whole
gallery of amazing figures in the earlier work, but the

126

Pecksniffian Earwicker, protean and purgatorial, though less
epic is not less vivid. Then there is that broth-of-a-boy
Siegmund-Shaun, sometimes figuring as a cherub, sometimes
imagining himself a priest, a much more muscular type of
Christian than Stephen Daedalus, entirely uninfluenced by
Greek or Judaistic thought, the burliest Norse-Irish convert
who ever escaladed the walls of Maynooth. As for verbal
beauties and fitnesses there are passages and phrases all
through that have the delicate magic and dramatic force that
one takes so much for granted from Mr. Joyce simply because
he is Mr. Joyce. There is the first paragraph of all with the
voice of Brigid answering from the turf fire, mishe ! mishe!
(lam, I am) to tauf tauf (baptise !) thuartpeatrick (peat,
Patrick). There is the final passage from the Anna Livia
chapter when the two women are discovered as tree and
stone ; there is the paragraph at the beginning of Part III
beginning, “ Methought as I was dropping asleep in somepart
in nonland of where’s please ” and the other “ When lo I
(whish o whish) mesaw, mestreamed through deafths of
durkness I heard a voice. ” There is the meditation on the
death of Mrs. Sanders to compare with an earlier Dublin
meditation (Swift’s on the death of Hester) and the delicious
little story ot the Ondt and the Gracehoper * (the champions
of space and time respectively) told by Shaun immediately
afterwards. The portrait of the Ondt is worth reproducing.

He was a weltall fellow, raumybult and abelboobied, bynear
saw altitudinous wee a schelling in kopfers. He was sair
sair sullemn and chairmanlooking when he was not making
spaces in his psyche, but laus ! when he wore making spaces

I. Republished in Three Fragments from Work in Progress, Black Sun
Press, Paris.

127

on his ikey he ware mouche moore secred and wisechairman-
looking.

This little interpolation is a satire but it is satire that is
like all good satire intensely serious and it is subjected to the
discipline of literary form. There is much talk of Time in
it — see for instance the passage describing the saturnalian
funeral of the old earwig (here transformed into Besterfarther
zeuts) piously arranged by the Gracehoper to an accompan-
iment of planetary music :

The whool of the whaal in the wheel of the whorl of the
Boubou from Bourneum has thus come to town.

Much, perhaps all, art consists in seeing the funeral of
one’s past from the emotionally static point of artistic creation
— emotion recollected in tranquility — time recollected in
space. The London master of spaces should read Mr. Joyce’s
fable. He might learn from it that Gracehopers, for all their
seeming time-ness are much more in space than the Ondts
who decide that they will “ not come to party at that lopps
The author of Time and the Western Man is a writer of
remarkable potentialities but he has so much contempt for
time that he never takes enough time to finish anything pro-
perly. If he would read the story of the Ondt and the Grace-
hoper, not impatiently but patiently he might learn from it
how to write satire not like a barbarian, ineffectively but like
an artist, effectively.

MR JOYCE’S TREATMENT OF PLOT

ELLI07 PAUL

MR. JOYCE’S TREATMENT
OF PLOT

Elliot Paul.

Since the first book, or part, of Mr. Joyce’s work was
completed in transition, and is available for study as a whole,
it is now possible to consider his general plan and discuss such
of his innovations as are more fundamental and original than
the distortion and combination of words and the blending into
an English composition of languages bordering upon English.
Naturally , with small fragments only before the critic, the phil-
ological aspect of the work has attracted the principal attention.
Strangely enough, Mr. Joyce has almost universally been denied
the right to do on a larger scale what any Yankee foreman
employing foreign laborers does habitually on a smaller scale,
namely, to work out a more elastic and a richer vocabulary
which will serve purposes unserved by school-room English.

This is not the only strange thing about the reception of
this work. With the precedent of Ulysses to suggest that
Joyce is capable of construction in the grand manner, the
majority of his former supporters have blandly assumed that
the present book is confused and meaningless and that he is
wasting his genius beyond the legitimate area within which
an artist may move.

132

There are so many men whose gifts and trainings would
make them so much better able to interpret Mr. Joyce’s work
than I am, that I offer the following observations with heart-
felt timidity. Had all such men come forward, this article
would have been unnecessary. But how few have found
either time or inclination to do so. My own inadequacy may,
perhaps, afford them encouragement.

In the first place, it seems futile to compare the new
work with any other book, especially Ulysses. There is
no similarity, either in execution or intent. Many indications
aside from the fact that the book begins in the middle of a
sentence point out that its design is circular, without the
beginning, middle and ending prescribed for chronological
narratives. The idea of past, present and future must be
laid aside, if one is to grasp the composition.

This is not impossible, given the slightest familiarity with
modern developments in physics or mathematics or even a
moderate appreciation of recent tendencies in painting. If
one can consider all events as having a standing regardless of
date, that the happenings of all the years are taken from their
place on the shelf and arranged, not in numerical order, but
according to a design dictated by the mind of Joyce, then the
text is not nearly so puzzling. For example, if Noah, Pre-
mier Gladstone and “ Papa ” Browning are telescoped into one,
because of common characteristics, no violence is done to logic.

“ Take an old geeser who calls on his skirt. Note his sleek
hair, so elegant, tableau vivant. He vows her to be his own
honey-lamb, swears they will be papa pals, by Sam, and share
good times way down west in a guaranteed happy lovenest
when May moon she shines and they twit twinkle all the
night, combing the comet’s tail up right and shooting popguns
at the stars. For dear old grumpapar, he’s gone on the

133

razzledar, through gazing and crazing and blazing at the stars.
She wants her wardrobe to hear from above by return with
cash so as she can buy her Peter Robinson trousseau and cut
a dash with Arty, Bert or possibly Charley Chance (who
knows?) so toll oil Mr. Hunker you’re too dada for me to
dance (so off she goes !) and that’s how half the gels in
town has got their bottom drars while grumpapar he’s trying
to hitch his braces on to his trars. But old grum he’s not so
clean dippy between sweet you and yum (not on your life,
boy! not in those trousers ! not by a large jugful 1) for some-
place on the sly, old grum has his gel number two (brave-
vow, ourGrum !)andhe would like to canoodle her too some
part of the time for he is downright fond of his number one
but O he’s fair mashed on peaches number two so that if he
could only canoodle the two all three would feel genuinely
happy, it’s as simple as A. B. C., the two mixers, we mean,
with their cherrybun chappy (for he is simply shamming
dippy) if they all were afloat in a dreamlifeboat, hugging
two by two in his zoo-doo-you-doo, a tofftoff for thee, mis-
symissy for me and howcameyouse’enso for Farber, in his
tippy, upindown dippy, tiptoptippy canoodle, can you ? ”

The treatment of space is equally elastic. Phoenix Park,
Dublin, becomes interchangeable at one time with the
Garden of Eden, again with the Biblical universe. The
Wellington monument and the surrounding drill-field contains
the field of Waterloo, when the author is so minded. Mr.
Joyce takes a point of view which commands all the seas and
continents and the clouds enveloping the earth. In one chap-
ter Anna LifFey, which represents Eve and the multi-mon-
ikered feminine element of the book, is joined to more than
fourhundred rivers by name and reference, including the
four rivers of Paradise and the four infernal rivers.

134

The characters are composed of hundreds of legendary
and historical figures, as the incidents are derived from
countless events. The “ hero ” or principal male character
is primarily Adam, and includes Abraham, Isaac, Noah,
Napoleon, the Archangel Michael, Saint Patrick, Jesse James,
any one at all who may be considered “ the big man ” in
any given situation. He is called each of the separate names
by which he has been known, or more frequently H. C. E.
(Here Comes Everybody, H. C. Earwicker). His symbol in
nature is the mountain.

His female counterpart, the river, is Eve, Josephine, Isolde,
Sarah, Aimee MacPherson, whoever you like occupying the
role of leading lady at any time or place. She is called most
often Anna Livia.

The philosophical framework upon which the text is drap-
ed was suggested to Mr. Joyce by a page from Vico, an
Italian philosopher of the late seventeenth century, who
proves to his own satisfaction the existence of a higher power
from the evidence in history that each new civilization in
turn finds in the ruins of its successor the elements neces-
sary for its growth. Vico likens civilization to the Phoenix.
Joyce stages his cosmos in Phoenix Park.

The“ elements” of the plot, which are not strung out,
one after the other, but are organized in such a way that any
phrase may serve as apart of more than one of them, are taken
from stories which are familiar to almost any one. Among
these are the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. From
beginning to end, a discussion of the nature of the original
sin is carried on in undertones, and often comes directly to
the surface. The tale of Noah’s ark, culminating with the rain-
bow as a symbol of God’s promise recurs again and again, and
the seven colors of the spectrum, thinly disguised, crop out in

frequent passages. “ the old terror of the dames, came hip
hop handihap out through the pikeopened arkway of his three
shuttoned castles, in his broadginger hat and his civic chollar
and his allabufiP hemmed, like a rudd yellan gruebleen
Orangeman in his violet indignonation

The “ fall motif ” is easily discerned in the Ballad of
Persse O’Reilley combined with the original sin inquest :

He was joulting by Wellinton’s monument
Our rotorious hippopopotamuns

When some bugger let down the backtrap of the omnibus
And he caught his death of fusiliers ”

The installment contained in transition. No. 6 contains a
detailed treatment, numbered and in order of their impor-
tance, of the twelve principal elements which are not concer-
ned with plot, but with characters, location, etc., of the book.
The first is H. C. E, the second Anna Livia, the third their
home, the fourth the garden, the fifth the manservant, the
sixth the maidservant, and so on.

The conflict between Michael and Lucifer is one of the
“ plot elements ” which can be traced through almost any
page. The fable of the “ Mookse and the Gripes ” is a
good starting point for the study of this component part, al-
though it appears in the first installment “ O foenix culprit! Ex
nickylow malo comes mickelmassed bonum, etc. ” Varia-
tions of the Latin phrase “ O felix culpa ” (which surely will
puzzle no Catholic) occur frequently,

The battle of Waterloo, with Wellington and Napoleon
substituting for Michael and Nick, is not an impossible leap
for an agile imagination, and the fact that Phoenix Park is
dominated by the Wellington monument makes these para-
llel trains of ideas quite easy to follow.

136

The Irish ballad of Finnegan’s wake serves as a vehicle for
the Humpty Dumpty andthe fall of Satan stories in several in-
stances. Finnegan was an Irish contractor who fell from a
scaffolding and was stretched out for dead. When his friends
toasted him at the supposed wake, Finnegan, aroused by the
word “ whiskey ”, sat up and drank. (The word“ usque-
adbaugham” is a variant of the Gaelic for whiskey.)

The birth of Isaac, the legend of Finn MacCool, the mur-
der of Abel by Cane, the Tristan and Isolde story, numerous
other familiar legends are similarly employed in the pattern
of Mr. Joyce’s book, and the design must be considered three
dimensionally. Often, in a painting, a part of the canvas
contains several forms, one in front of another, with the near
ones transparent, So must one of Mr. Joyce’s paragraphs
be understood. He has achieved actual polyphony, far beyond
the implied polyphony of the Cyclops chapter of Ulysses, for
example.

I have made no attempt to say all that may be said about
his treatment of plot. If I have given a cue as to how to
proceed in the delightful exercise of discovering it and enjoy-
ing it, I shall be quite content. Those who cannot transcend
Aristotle need make no attempt to read this fascinating
epic. The ideas do not march single file, nor at a uniform
speed.

Whatever difficulties the individual words may present,
and they have been much exaggerated, — however baffling
it may be to find the elements of character and of plot exten-
ding forward and backward as well as from left to right, the
sentence structure and the syntax generally will offer no
obstacles. Although sentences are frequently long, their lines
are definite and the parent ideas stand head and shoulders
above their flock of details. Gems like the following are

137

inconspicuous only because of the equal excellence of their
context :

“ Lead kindly foul ! They always did : ask the ages.
What bird has done yesterday man may do next year, be it
fly, be it moult, be it hatch, be it agreement in the nest. For
her socioscientific sense is sound as a bell, sir, her volucrine
automutativeness right on normalcy: she knows, she just
feels she was kind of born to lay and love eggs (trust her to
propagate the speccies and hoosh her fluffballs safe through
din an danger !); lastly but mostly, in her genesic fieM it is
all game and no gammon, she is ladylike en everything she
does and plays the gentleman’s part every time. Let us au-
spice it ! Yes, before all this has time to end the golden age
must return with its vengeance. Man will become dirigible,
age will be rejuvenated, woman with her ridiculous white
burden will reach by one step sublime incubation, the mane-
wanting human lioness with her dishorned discipular man-
ram will lie down together publicly flank upon fleece. No,
assuredly, they are not justified, those gloompourers, who
grouse that letters have never been quite their old selves again
since that weird weekday in bleak Janiveer when, to the
shock of both, Biddy Doran looked at literature. ”

It is to be expected that Mr. Joyce’s enormous and incid-
ental contribution to philology will be recognized in advance
of his subtler aesthetic achievements but the latter is sure to
follow and it may prove interesting to observe how, one by
one, his former supporters try to creep unostentatiously over
the tailboard of the bandwagon.

JOYCE & HIS DYNAMIC

JOHN RODKER

JOYCE & HIS DYNAMIC

John Rodker.

With this latest work some enquiry into the symbols that
govern the communication through writing of thought and
emotion becomes imperative. It would seem that we have
reached a degree of consciousness where we find it no longer
adequate to use words as we use them in speeeh, for we
recognise in speech only the superficial movement of pro-
founder currents.

How do men then, through literature, communicate with
each other and what is it they succeed in conveying.

Certainly they use words and these words and the meanings
commonly attached to them, provoke in the reader associat-
ions true for himself, possibly widely true for humanity, but
it may be remote in the extreme from the author’s intention.
In any case the accustomed channels traced by speech and the
writing that resembles it provoke no confusion, no complicat-
ion of associations. They may be said to follow the path of
least resistance ; least resistance for the author, least resistance
in the reader, no transfusion, no change.

Yet the reader is susceptible to contacts profounder than
those described, indeed he commonly supplies them to

142

complete the author’s indications which for a multitude of
reasons the author has found himself unable or unwilling to
fill in. Here it is as though the words held in solution the
elements, inarticulate in both reader and author, which we call
dynamic ; their core is those basic preoccupations round which
we most deeply move, they are at the root of every later
development of the soul ; these have always been the chief
preoccupation and gratification of what we call creative writ-
ing. For thinking is first affective, words make it flesh in so
far as they serve to define feeling, but beneath all words lie
affective contacts which might, it would seem, entirely dis-
pense with words as signs but not as sounds.

Not only is this so but any word, however unjustifiable
and nonsensical it may seem, moves the mind to an attempt
to visualise that word. The new term borrows from and
consequently lends to the term it apes, the abortive associat-
ions which accompany it cannot but enrich with their frus-
trated vibrations the term which was the basis of the inven-
tion. This is an extreme instance interesting only as an
example of how the mind works, but it must be obvious that
an author, completely aware (and by completely I mean to a
degree transcending literature as we have known it) of the
forces he is using and anxious to produce the most naturalistic
picture possible of an individual and of the repressions,
complications, forces which direct that individual before they
express themselves in words, must have recourse to all the
hybrid formless onomatopoeic and conventional sounds in
which feeling clothes itself*.

I . A consideration (notion, idea) or an idea is relevant to an interpretation
when it forms part of the psychological context which links other contexts
together in the peculiar fashion in which interpretation so links them. Irrel-

143

Should his technique then be adequate to all these require-
ments he will most quickly and vitally establish himself (on
his own terms and not on those of his auditor) in a permanent
symbiosis with that auditor.

Joyce’s virtuosity in this new work is a very remarkable
phenomenon in that it is adequate to the requirements post-
ulated. Because of his method, because of his pursuit of the
innumerable paths of association by means of all the word —
ways capable of delimiting them, if not exactly, at least with
a precision so far unknown in literature, he now brings to
fruition what was foreshadowed in Ulysses ; the possibility of
a complete symbiosis of reader and writer ; the only obstacle
which now remains being the inadequacy of the reader’s
sphere of reference — not to the emotional content — but to
the ideas, objects and events given.

Yet when Ulysses made its first appearance it seemed in-
comprehensible to a number of people. It is a complaint we
do not at all hear today. Evidently then, though in a some-
what unusual and baffling form, the elements which com-
posed it were well within the sphere of contemporary refer-
ence.

The dynamic aspect of the work derives a large part of its
importance from the fact that words are used so to speak ‘in
vacuo’ by means of which they still preserve much of their
ancient magic. Puns, klang words, mantrams are powerful
because they are disguised manifestations of revengeful and
iconoclastic impulses driven underground by fear ; and be-

evant consideration is a non-linking member of a psychological context...
mental process is not determined purely psychologically but by blood pressure
also.

The Meaning of Meaning. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards.

Kegan Paul.

144

cause the violence of childhood inspires them, their un-
derground life compacted, made sly, imparts to them an
intense vitality.

To show still more obviously that he is creating a language
the author indulges in an amazing virtuosity of puns. The
child’s seeming innocence is to him and to us one of the
deepest sources of gratification. Joyce makes intense use of
this screen.

How sly satire can prove, how joyful, how inspiring, what
lusts of combat it can evoke let the parable of the Mookse and
the Gripes or the immense Rabelaisian humour of the 5th
‘transition’ instalment witness.

The need for a vehicle by means of which to express the
more elaborate consciousness of the time provoked, I imagine,
the apparition of a Rabelais and Chaucer. To formal expres-
sion, formal emotion, they opposed their individualities and
the vitality of common speech, which by its nature is not
subject to the refinements which seem inevitably to accompany
the development of literature and the spread of writing.

Since the vernacular is as it were a storehouse of all the
sounds necessary to expression, however complicatedly
foreign or refined they may seem today in regard to the actual
needs of the populace, the common speech holds within it
relics of tongues spoken it may be millions of years before
symbols were invented. It is impossible therefore for us not
to respond to words, all words and all forms of words, but
writing and speech are so denatured that it is important, if
we are not forever to be deprived of part of our emotional
inheritance, that these primitive forms be returned to
us. Joyce is doing this for us ; the result is an intense and
basic revitalising of words and our attitude to them . Posterity
is immensely indebted to him.

145

We see for ourselves in the Europe of today that there has
been little which by the standards we know but find so hard
to define, can be called dynamic. Emotion in literature has
grown formal, as have perhaps the emotions themselves, and
it is very apparent how the writer’s consciousness seems
continually to grow more circumscribed.

Joyce is revitalising our language in a form which borrows
vastly from the past in its every protean disguise. In the
vernacular, whether English, Irish, American or any of the
combinations of these or other tongues, he finds that breath
which will revivify our dying tongue. Is not this perhaps the
most important aspect of his work ? And is it not already
predestined to be — with its content — a mine where future
writers will quarry as they are already quarrying in Ulysses ;
a pyramid of language, a monument to time built with such
loving care, so great a feeling for material, such density, as to
be unique in English.

This work also contains psychological implications of the
greatest value and has been created with a concentration of
toil which must be unique among the writers of this gene-
ration.

As to its meaning ?

As in the unconscious, in this new work there is no time.
Events, people, make their own relevant conjunctions. Events
are people too, a whole cosmographication of them. But the
form is so elusive — alas where is our field of reference — and
the associations often so personal to the author as to be
incomprehensible to us that it seems half the matter is lost,
as though indeed it were the inside of a pyramid which must
always be hidden from us.

Is it possible this attempt to make the unconscious conscious
may but end in confusing the rapport between author and

146

reader ? Possibly for a while. But a first confusion gives
place to a deeper, more complete identification ; and I think
of Ulysses and how with the complete work and some pas-
sage of time this « Work in Progress » must become apparent
to us.

This is certain. « Work in Progress » is much in advance
of Ulysses, both as to elasticity of writing, naturalism, the
pulse of life ; it is technically unique, as Ulysses was not. In
the straight passages, such as those concerned with the River
LifFey, no writer to my knowledge, drawing from all the
sources of human comparison has ever rendered so rapturously,
so indirectly, or so revealingly (it is not strange that the
secret, the baffled should be to us more profoundly, dynamic-
ally true than the simple) the life of a river — river of life ;
nor elsewhere evoked such moments of inarticulate rapture.

BEFORE ULYSSES — AND AFTER

ROBERT SAGE

BEFORE ULYSSES — AND AFTER

Robert Sage.

The general bafflement caused by those portions of James
Joyce’s Work in Progress which have appeared in transition
seems to me an indication that most readers have failed to
realize that Joyce’s writings, from Dubliners to the present
book, form an indivisible whole.

Ordinarily the graph of a writer’s career ascends, with slight
irregularities, to a horizontal line representing the culmination
of development. That is, after a period of trial and error, he
achieves an individual manner of expression and his works
thenceforth are variations on a theme, becoming successively
richer perhaps and more perfect but not differing in their
bases one from another.

Joyce’s development, conversely, has been and continues to
be a firm mounting line. Each of his books has represented
an enormous advance in expression and technique, each has
been the record of a corresponding advance in the author’s
spiritual life. It is unlikely that he will repeat himself ; and
to predict, as some have done, that he will in the end return
to the simplicity Dubliners is to admit a profound incompre-
hension of his mind.

This consistent development is apparent even in single
books, as may be noticed by comparing the first pages of

150

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the dosing
pages or the first chapter of Ulysses with the ensuing ones.
But, like other writers, Joyce has of course his constant qua-
lities, although they are less evident ; and it is these that must
be searched for in his earlier works before a proper approach
may be made to Work in Progress.

The progression through Dubliners^ the Portrait and Ulys-
ses to the present work, besides demonstrating a steady spir-
itual and literary expansion, crystallizes one constant factor
that is of primary importance in understanding Joyce ; namely,
the fact that his style and technique are tyrannically dictated
by the nature of his subject. In this respect his writing is
perhaps the purest in the English language. There is a strong
personal dye in all that he has ever written, from an unpre-
tentious phrase in Chamber Music to an involved page-long
sentence in Work in Progress ; but the elasticity and resilience
of his technique are so immense that they permit it to stretch
out and close in over every minute tendril of the subject’s
organism, whereas in the works of other writers the corners
and protruding ends are apt to be chipped oflP in order that
the main portions may be crammed into the confines of a
rigid technique. It is this power that sometimes makes Joyce
difficult, for, since the subject is so closely encased, there
remain none of the vacant spaces which another writer would
fill in with explanations.

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the narrative
opens in the babbling language and from the irrational view-
point of a small child. As the child grows older the language
and viewpoint become imperceptibly riper in proportion, until
the story ultimately takes the form of the entries which
Stephen Dedalus makes in his diary when his soul is tortured
by the mental and physical revolt of adolescence. Nothing

outside the consciousness of Stephen is included nor is there
a phrase in the novel which does not contribute directly to
the development of the theme.

The vantage point of Ulysses, a vastly more complex book,
in which the subconscious to a large extent supplants the
external and the conscious, shifts frequently, yet the rhythm,
the tempo, the vocabulary and the limits of the frame are
always determined by the subject.

The consistency with which Joyce adheres to this method
is illustrated too by his disdain for transitions. When one
unit of his work has come to its natural termination he drops
it and turns to the next. He does not insert an announce-
ment that six months have now passed in the life of Stephen or
that the ensuing pages will reproduce the drowsy flow of
Mrs Bloom’s consciousness as she lies in bed. Such a pro-
cedure would be alien to his mind and would seriously damage
the organic quality of his writing.

This closeness of composition is intimately related to
another phase of Joyce’s character — his preoccupation with
words, a preoccupation which, apparent in the verbal precision
of his early writing, has now become so highly developed
that it has blinded most of his readers to the rich internal art
of his latest work.

On the first page of the first story in Dubliners (written
when Joyce was in his early twenties) I find the following
significant passage :

“ Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself
the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like
the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism.
But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful
being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and
to look upon its deadly work. ”

152

His readers will remember Stephen’s reflections after dis-
cussing the word funnel with the dean of his school, an
English convert to Catholicism :

‘‘ — The language in which we are speaking is his before it is
mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his
lips and on mine 1 I cannot speak or write these words without
unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always
be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words.
My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his
language. ”

Again, the youthful Stephen communes with himself as he
stands on the North Bull bridge :

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to
himself :

— A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

“ The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord.
Words. Was it their colours He allowed them to glow and fade,
hue after hue : sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards,
azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not
their colours : it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did
he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their
associations of legend and colour .? Or was it that, being as weak of
sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection
of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many-
coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner
world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple per-
iodic prose ”

Here is Stephen-Joyce reacting to the occult power of words
as another might react to caresses or blows. His “soul
frets ” in their presence, they “ fill him with fear ”, certain
of them he “ cannot speak or write without unrest of spirit”.

153

they evoke in him more intense emotions than the phenomena
of the outer world. This is not an affectation. It is as vital
a part of Joyce as his Irish birth or his Catholic training.
Possibly, as he suggests, the weakness of his eyesight has
sensitized his appreciation of the images that may be built
from words ; but, whatever the cause, this almost abnormal
need for the nourishment of verbal associations has made it
possible for him to write such sentences as “ And low stole
o’er the stillness the heartbeats of sleep ”, in which he voices an
emotion tuned to the pulse of the ages and familiar to all
humankind.

It is little wonder then that, as the years have gone by,
Joyce has reached out farther and farther in his explorations
of the world’s languages and has cut ever more deeply into
the roots of the language formed by the successive generations
of his ancestors. Nor is it any wonder that the wealth and
range of his vocabulary have grown with each chapter and
that his interests in recent years have become concentrated
on the magnificent universe that may be brought into being
by language.

It may at first seem that a chasm as wide as infinity separ-
ates the warm melodious lines above quoted from such sent-
ences as :

“ So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound ove
to carry three score and ten toptypsical reading throughout the book
of Doublends Jined till Death, who oped it, closeth thereof the dor. ”

But each passage comes in its time. The Joyce of today is
reflected as authentically in the last quotation as was the
adolescent Stephen in the verses he wrote when “ the liquid
letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery, flowed
forth over his brain

154

Inevitably his extension of the boundaries of language has
been but half of the phenomenon which is complemented by
a similar enlargement of conception. By following Joyce’s
evolution through the four prose works one finds his “ inner
world of individual emotions ” widening out from the intense-
ly personal until it circumscribes a crowded cosmography.
The short stories of Dubliners were re-creations of people
Joyce had known in Dublin and of events he had witnessed.
Beyond this, the stories were rich in personal and atmospheric
overtones, but it was not until he wrote the Portrait that he
was to subordinate the visible world. Here, despite the
superb characterization of Simon Dedalus and such graphic
scenes as the Christmas dinner, he was occupied with his own
spiritual self, in recording the de profundis of a sensitive boy’s
turbulent passage through the sexual and spiritual crises of
adolescence. Ulysses in parts ascended to a cosmic plane and
displayed a Joyce who had advanced from the spiritual conflicts
of youth to the more complex ones of maturity. Individual
emotions were now tranformed into the universal. Leopold
Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, for all the realistic cataloguing
of their thoughts, actions and habits, were phases of Joyce’s
mind personified by figures similar in dimension to Pantagruel,
Faust or Don Quixotte. Dublin, although its streets, pubs,
shops and citizens were called by name, was not so much the
insular capital of 300,000 inhabitants as it was a universal city
freed from all geographical boundaries. The acute conscious-
ness that formed the roadway through the Portrait was
frequently abandoned for explorations in the pits of the
unconscious.

It can be seen today that there already existed most of the
indications of what Joyce would do next, not only in the
universalization of character and scene but in the accomp-

155

anying technical and philological inventions. But it is
extremely doubtful that even his closest students predicted the
enormous distance he was to travel between the completion
of Ulysses in 1921 and the publication of the opening pages
of Work in Progress in transition six years later.

Yet his direction has continued to be in a straight line : his
new work is intimately associated with what he has done in
the past and its origins are to be found in his earlier books.
Work in Progress again takes the form decreed by the con-
ception, it again demonstrates Joyce’s preoccupation with the
word and his mastery of it, it is again the transformation of
a troubled spirit into the symbols of social life, it again makes
use of the necessary technical inventions, it carries to the
extreme limits the universalization of character and the sketch-
ing of a cosmorama started in Ulysses, and, like all of Joyce’s
books, it is again fundamentally a book of Dublin.

It is all this and much more — but always within the limits
of that straight line. This time Joyce enlarges upon his
method of reproducing the synthetic creations of half-con-
sciousness, which he introduced so remarkably in the closing
pages of Ulysses, and carries it to the realm of sleep, where
thousands of thoughts are thrown together into a pattern
expressed by a vocabulary of its own. He has embraced the
world, heaven, hell and the celestial bodies, and, instead ot
observing the traditional chronological scheme, with the nar-
rative fibres sharply separated and treated as individual unities,
he has telescoped time, space, all humanity and the universe
of gods and heroes. This latter fact — consistent with his own
development but in opposition to all previous literary canons
— should be emphasized in order that the uninitiated reader
will understand at the outset that he is faced with a revolu-
tionary four-dimensional conception of the universe, that the

156

“ characters ” who bob up briefly, disappear and reappear in
various forms and in unexpected company are composite,
that time plays no part, that Joyce reaches out into all space
to take what he for the moment requires. The reader must
be prepared at times to visualize several related images sim-
ultaneously, realizing that these images are not necessarily
bound together by surface-obvious associational chains but
that their range may include any desired point in political or
religious history, legend, fable, mythology, science, mathem-
atics, current events, etc.

In this unprecedented creative work there is, properly speak-
ing, no plot, no character development, no action, no narrative
sequence. Instead there is presented such a picture of the
entire universe as might be registered in the slumbering mind
of a capricious god who, from some infinite point in space,
had'witnessed the planets and heaven and hell unwind their
history on the edge of those few terrestrial square miles now
known by the name of Dublin.

History, as we all know, is none too reliable ; but the purpose,
at least, of the modern historian is to record, correlate and in-
terpret facts as accurately as possible. The Biblical, Greek and
Celtic historians, however, were hindered by no such prosaic
idea. The Bible is a hodgepodge of fact and legend. Ancient
Greek history is so tightly bound up with the feats of the gods
that myth and actuality are inseparably merged. The early
chroniclers of Ireland told their history mostly through col-
orful legends. And anyone with a true appreciation of the
art of storytelling will prefer these old histories where facts
are buried within imaginative stories to the new histories
which are dry catalogues of dates and events ; for the former
offer truth through the medium of art and the latter only
reach an approximate truth through research and reporting.

157

Coming from a country as rich in legend and folklore as
Ireland, it is not surprising that Joyce should have had the
idea of creating a history of the universe and creating a
language in which such a history would have to be related.
This, in brief, is what he has done in the book that at present
is known only as Work in Progress. On a cosmic scale it is
the history of Dublin and the spiritual and intellectual auto-
biography of Joyce. Figures of the past and present flit
through it spectrally as they have through the world’s exis-
tence and through the mind of Joyce. Finn MacCool, Adam
and Eve, Humpty-Dumpty, Napoleon, Daddy Browning,
Lucifer, Wyndham Lewis, the Archangel Michael, Santa
Claus, Tristram and Isolde, Noah, St. Patrick, Thor and
Dean Swift are a few of the thousands of worthies whose
shades pass through the pages of Work in Progress.

All this is indicated by Joyce himself, who says on page i6
of transition no. 5 :

The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture. There
was a time when naif alphabetters would have written it down the
tracing of a purely deliquescent recidivist, possibly ambidextrous,
snubnosed probably and presenting a strangely profound rainbowl in
his (or her) occiput Closer inspection of the bordereau would reveal
a multiplicity of personalities inflicted on the document and some
prevision of virtual crime or crimes might be made by anyone unwary
enough before any suitable occasion for it or them had so far managed
to happen along. In fact, under the close eyes of the inspectors the
traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarieties eliminated,
in one stable somebody similarly as by the providential warring of
heart shaker with housebreaker and of dramdrinker against free thinker
our social something bowls along bumpily, experiencing a jolting
series of prearranged disappointments, down the long lane of (it’s as
semper as oxhouse-humper!) generations, more generations and still
more generations. ”

158

And a few lines later he offers a bit of advice that may
well be kept in mind while investigating the contents of Work
in Progress :

“ Now, patience ; and remember patience is the great thing, and
above all things else we must avoid anything like being or becoming
out of patience.

But even with a general idea of Joyce’s purpose and methods,
it is sometimes possible only with difficulty to follow this new
work, for Joyce’s erudition results in numerous allusions
outside the usual range of knowledge, while his philological
versatility — often materializing in the obscure forrr of his
distortions — presents serious obstacles to even his most
sympathetic readers. Moreover, where in the Portrait and
Ulysses the abrupt transitions were from chapter to chapter
or from paragraph to paragraph, they are here from sentence
to sentence, from word to word, or even sometimes from syl-
lable to syllable, thus making an unrelieved demand on the
attention.

However, for a closer approach to Joyce’s conception, verbal
structure, technique and style, the portions dealing with Anna
Livia are perhaps better adapted to separate consideration
than others, for this theme, while a vital and representative
element of the book as a whole, is self-containing when
detached*.

Joyce has here immortalized the muddy little River LiflFey,
which rises in the Wicklow Mountains about twelve miles
southwest of Dublin and, after curling through some fifty
miles of picturesque scenery, empties into Dublin Bay.

I. Published separately as Anna Livia Plurabelle, Crosby Gaige, N. Y.,
1928.

159

Strangely enough, it difters from the other rivers that have
figured in legend and folklore by being personified as a woman
instead of a man. Among the sixteen Irish rivers represented
by heads on the corners of the old Dublin Customs House
the Liffey was the only one with feminine features, and the
citizens of Dublin speak affectionately of their miniature river
as the Anna Liffey, perhaps taking the name from the old
records, where it is referred to as the Avenlithe.

In Work in Progress this river is christened Anna Livia,
with the Plurabelle added to designate the numerous tiny
tributaries of the stream. She becomes neither entirely a
woman nor entirely a river, but rather an abstraction, a leg-
endary concept, possessing all the attributes of the female sex
and sometimes having the majesty of a goddess, sometimes
the shameless promiscuity of a scullery maid. She coalesces ”
with other female characters of history. Biblical legend and
folklore, returning persistently in one form or another to the
surface of the chronicle.

Opposite her is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (Here
Comes Everybody), the strange composite male character who
haunts this cosmic history in many disguises and under
endless names, the most frequent of the latter being Persse
O’Reilley, a deformation of the word Perce-Oreille, the French
for earwig ”. He is represented in nature usually by the
mountain, and both he and Anna Livia Plurabelle are repeat-
edly alluded to by their initials or by series of words begin-
ning with these letters.

They are introduced on page 13 of transition no. i in the
following manner :

Yet may we not see still the brontoichthyan form outlined,
aslumbered, even in our own nighttime by the sedge of the troutling
stream that Bronto loved and Brunto had a lean on. Hie ciibat edilis

Apud lihertinam parvulam. Whatif she be in flags or flitters, reekierags
or sundyechosies, with a mint of monies or beggar a pinnyweight,
arrah, sure, we all love little Anny Ruiny, or, we mean to say, love
little Anna Rayiny, when unda her brella, mid piddle med puddle she
ninnygoes nannygoes nancing by. Yoh ! Brontolone slaaps you
snoores. Upon Benn Heather, in Seeple Iseut too. The cranic head
on him, caster of his reasons, peer yuthner in yondmist. Whooth ^
His clay feet, swarded in verdigrass, stick up starck where he lastfel-
lonem, by the mund of the magazine wall, where our maggy seen all,
with her sister-in-shawl. While over against this belles’ alliance
beyind 111 Sixty, ollollowed ill ! bagsides of the fort, bom, tarabom,
tararabom, lurk the ombushes, the site of the liffing-in-wait of the
upjock and hockums. ”

The passage also illustrates many peculiarities of Joyce’s
manner, such as the combination of several images in a
single word (“ brontoichthyan ” — “ bronto ”, thunder:
“ ichthyan ”, pertaining to fish: “ ichthyol ”, brown, the
brown liquid made from fossilized fish). The male and
female characters are recalled in the initials H. C. E. and
A. L. P. of the Latin words. An extraordinary image of the
little river’s current, vivid and with the non-sense appeal of
a nursery rhyme, is evoked in the phonetic effect of the line
starting “ mid piddle med puddle ”, while Joyce’s fondness
for puns leads him to place “ maggy seen all ” after a
reference to the Magazine wall, the subject of a famous
epithet by Swift and one of landmarks of Dublin which is
mentioned continually in the work.

Anna Livia’s appearance after this is frequent enough, and
she entirely occupies the foreground in the closing part of
Book I. (The Book of Life), a section which originally
appeared in le Navire d' Argent of September, 1925, was
reprinted in a greatly expanded form in transition no. 8 and,

after extensive further additions, was issued in a separate
volume in the winter of 1928. This portion is beautifully
introduced by a passage which immediately precedes it but
which is not included in the book *

with a beck, with a spring, all her rillringlets shaking, rocks
drops in her tachie, tramtickets in her hair, all waived to a point and
then all innuendation, little oldfashioned mummy, little wonderful
mummy, ducking under bridges, belihopping the weirs, dodging by
a bit of bog, rapidshooting round the bends, by Tallaght’s green hills
and the pools of the phooka and a place they call it Blessington and
slipping sly by Sallynoggin, as happy as the day is wet, babbling,
bubbling, chattering to herself, deloothering the fields on their elbows
leaning with the sloothering slide of her, giddygaddy, grannyma,
gossipaceous Anna Livia ! ”

Then comes the chatter of two garrulous old washerwomen
beating their clothes in the turf-colored waters of the Liffey.
“ O tell me all about Anna Livia I I want to hear all about
Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia ? Yes, of course,
we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now.
You’ll die when you hear ” — thus starts this episode,
written throughout in a rhythmic prose which imitates the
sound of the river’s current as the banks grow farther apart
or approach each other on the course between the mountains
and the sea.

The entire episode is the transfigured conversation of the
washerwomen prattling scandalously of the things that have
been done by the owners of the clothes they are washing-
And, as two old women in a village would bring all the
townspeople and local events into their gossip, so the
washerowmen talk of Dublin, the Dublin of the legendary
past, the Dublin of today and the Dublin that existed in the
intermediary ages. As night comes on, their voices grow

blurred and faint and a metamorphosis takes place, leaving
them standing as a stone and an elm tree on the opposite
banks of the Liffey.

The real story that lies below the transparent upper plane
is that of Anna Livia, Dublin’s river, and the sea rover who
founded the city. It is the story too of Dublin itself, the
Ford of the Hurdles, as brought down from the dim beginning
of the ages by record, fable and legend and as kept alive in
the speech of its people, the names of its places and the tales
passed on by one generation to the next. Or it is, to some
extent, the tale of the world’s rivers, or even the abstract
concept of “ river ”, for Joyce, giving a new dignity to the
pun, has subtly woven into his text the names of hundreds
of rivers in all parts of the world, as well as all things
possessing fluvial associations.

The characters, as usual, merge : they are Anna and
Humphrey, the city and its founder, the river and the
mountain, the trout and the salmon, the male and the female
— any personnages who conform to the author’s purposes.
As for the washerwomen whose rambling gossip forms the
vehicle for the tale, they, beyond their immediate personal-
ities, are identified in a large sense with the great forces of
death and love, which in turn are represented by the immob-
ile stone and the graceful elm.

With this latitude of character treatment, condensation of
material and freedom from the restrictions of time and space,
Joyce is able to put into the sixty-one small pages of Anna
Livia Plurabelle a quantity of matter which, elucidatively
expanded into a conventional presentation, would fill perhaps
several volumes. He once again “ covers the subject ” by
orchestrating his theme with a poetic encyclopaedia of related
strains, as in the opening pages of Work in Progress he

i63

brought together the various versions of the fall motif, from
Lucifer to Napoleon and from Humpty-Dumpty to Tim
Finnigan.

A multiplicity of concepts placed in immediate contact by
a super-rational associational process that is divorced from
chronology, place distinction or segregation of fact and myth-
and expressed in a special language moulded for their require-
ments may, then, be taken as the groundwork of Joyce’s
new book. As Elliot Paul remarked in his essay on its plot
elements, the work does not possess the usual beginning,
middle and end, but — following Vico’s theory of successive
civilizations built in a Phoenix-like circle — may begin
at any point and end at the same point. Anna Livia Plu-
rabelle is a complete unit when read alone, yet its veins and
arteries extend to all parts of the organism to which it belongs.

And if Work in Progress, because of the magnitude of its
subject and the breadth of its treatment, may at first appear
to be the most impersonal of Joyce’s books, a closer
inspection will show that this is an appearance only, for he
has found room in these tightly packed pages for the things
he has thought, the sights he has seen, the people he has
known, the subjects he has read about, the jokes he has
heard, the plays he has attended — all the topics that have
attracted his interest during a period of many years. Like
his unforgettable Leopold Bloom, he is fascinated by the
curious and little-known elements of human knowledge;
and he has inserted literally thousands of references to these
strange subjects in his text, where they blend harmoniously
with seemingly foreign neighbors, assuming that universal
and timeless sense that makes them collectively form the
body of a great new cycle of legends.

It is this unusual manner of working that will cause Joyce’s

164

new work to differ from the others in displaying no stylistic
advance in its successive pages, for he has, so to speak,
written the entire book simultaneously, inserting his new
ideas continually in whatever part of the supple text they are
appropriate. How Work in Progress has developed like a
living organism may be observed by a comparison ot the three
published versions of Anna Livia Plurabelle, of which the
passage below is a sample :

“ Well, you know or don’t you know or haven’t I told you every
story has an end and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look,
the dusk is growing. What time is it It must be late. It’s ages
now since I or anyone last saw Waterhouse’s clock. They took it
asunder, I heard them say. When will they reassemble it ^ ”

(Le Navire d* Argent, September, 1925, p. 72.)

“ Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every
story has an end and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look,
the dusk is growing. Fieluhr ? Filou ! What age is it. It saon
is late. ’Tis endless now since I or anyone last saw Waterhouse’s
clock. They took it asunder, I heard them say. When will they
reassemble it ? ”

(Transition, no. 8, p. ^3.)

Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every
telling has a taling and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look,
the dusk is growing. My branches lofty are taking root. And my
cold cher’s gone ashley. Fieluhr Filou ! What age is at ? It
saon is late. ’Tis endless now since eye or erewone last saw
Waterhouse’s clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd them sigh.
When will they reassemble it ? ”

(Anna Livia Plurabelle, p. 52.)

When one has followed Joyce through his books, this

prose does not seem the unintelligible jumble of crippled
words which it apparently represents to many readers. One
remembers the boy for whom the word paralysis had a
dreadful fascination, one recalls Stephen standing at the edge
of the bridge trying to analyze his pleasure in the phrase,
“ A day of dappled seaborne clouds ” from Hugh Miller’s
A Testament of the Rocks, one thinks of the amazing lingu-
istic excursions in Ulysses. When all of Joyce’s work is
placed together Work in Progress takes its position at the
head of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and Ulysses, revealing itself as writing of almost unparalleled
beauty, rhythmic and mellowly colored, endlessly suggestive
in its ideological content, frequently humorous, stimulating
in its resourcefulness, and, above all, unmistakably branded
with the unique genius of Joyce.

It commemorates the place where Joyce has paused on the
way he has persistently followed for more than two decades.
It has been a lonely way, a way that has lost him sym-
pathizers and friends. Many of his admirers stopped off at
the Portrait, most of the remainder refused to go farther
than Ulysses. A few, a very few, have accompanied him
the entire distance and, even if not always understanding,
have recognized the immensity of his undertaking and have
been eager to overcome its difficulties. Be that as it may,
neither silence nor attack has deterred Joyce from allowing
his natural development to continue to its logical conclusion,
however solitary the destination might prove.

He has been opposed mostly because of the unfamiliar
text which his verbal innovations formed, few of his readers
looking far enough past this preliminary barrier to see that
the revolutionary word scheme was demanded by the vast
multiple plan of the book. It was assumed that Joyce had

i66

taken it upon himself to offer the English-speaking world a
remodelled version of its language. His writing was impat-
iently labelled as meaningless and without form, and his
critics declared in effect that, far from being Stephen’s ideal
of “ lucid, supple, periodic prose ”, it was neither lucid nor
periodic — and, for that matter, could only by courtesy be
classified as prose.

All this is the unjust act of judging a book by its jacket.
It is quite possible that many of the words composed by
Joyce (always with sound philological authority) will event-
ually find a place in our speech, or at least in our literary
language ; but such an eventuality, unless I am greatly
mistaken, is incidental to the purposes of Work in Progress.
Suppose, however, that Joyce did have the presumption to
contribute a few suggestions for the further expansion of our
language — why should the gesture be received with indigna-
tion ? English is a notorious borrower and manufacturer.
Contrary to the claims of the purists it is not selfsufficient nor
has it reached its saturation point, as is continually being pro-
ved by the adoption or coining of such words as kiosk, camou-
flage, jitney, skyscraper, radio, ja^\, kodak. Like all other
modern languages, too, it contains numerous subsidiary
vocabularies evolved within the past few generations to fulfill
the needs of such specialized branches of human activity as
the sciences, the trades and the professions. Why, then,
should it be considered an outrage that Joyce has created a
terminology of his own to express a conception that lacks the
appropriate symbols in the existing tongue ? In many cases
he has crossed common ground in his work, and his passage
has more than once left words that are full of interest.
Although its length would prevent its general use, I can
think of no more completely descriptive word for a skyscraper

i67

that hierarchitectitoploftical nor one that blends a dozen
words into a fuller summary of a man’s character than violer
(Tamores, while a delight to be found on almost every page
of Work in Progress is the pertinent humor of such words
as shampain applied to a morning-after headache ; clapplause,
which instantly revivifies a lacklustre term, or dontelleries,
which, referring to lingerie, surprisingly transforms the
French word for lace.

To call this work meaningless and formless is an under-
standable mistake; but it is amazing that so few critics should
have remarked its rhythmical qualities and the multitude of
rhetorical devices it contains. Beside being crammed to
bursting with meaning, it maintains a rhythm that accomp-
anies the subject throughout, and if its lucidity is that of a
deep pool rather than of a wash basin, its submission to
discipline is no less rigorous than the classics. Consider,
for example, a passage which, curiously enough, has been
quoted as an illustration of Joyce’s inefficiency in handling
language ;

She was just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing then,
sauntering, by silvamoonlake and he was a heavy trudging lurching
lieabroad of a Curraghman, making his hay for whose sun to shine
on, as tough as the oaktrees (peats be with them !) used to rustle that
time down by the dykes of killing Kildare, for forstfellfoss with a
plash across her. ”

Here is a sentence that is pool-like in its lucidity, that is
supple and periodic. Few authors ever wrote a sentence
with a more complete consciousness of every effect they
wished to obtain or with a more telling employment of the
rhetorical devices at their disposal. In it the female and
male characters take the form of a stream and a tree, and

i68

the development of the stream to a lake and then to a cascade
through the intervention of the tree is related simply through
the triple agency of verbal significance, rhythm and phonetic
value.

The sentence opens, it will be noticed, with fifteen one-
syllable words, the first eleven being accented, the twelfth
and thirteenth hastening the rhythm through their lack of
accent and the final two returning to long beats. Through
this Joyce suggests the weakness and uncertainty of the stream
at its commencement (girlhood). Then comes the stronger
three-syllable word sauntering, indicating development (adol-
escence) and leading by a short beat to the epitritus silva-
moonlake, signifying full growth (maturity), the further assoc-
iations with the latter stage being sylvan and the silver
moon reflected in the lake. The male symbol is immediately
introduced in the three ponderous trochees heavy trudging
lurching^ continuing to the molossus forstfellfoss, which
balances silvamoonlake and suggests first, forest, fell and
waterfall, the foss coming from the Scandinavian designation
of waterfall. The latter part of the sentence, then, completes
the introduction of the two symbols by describing the creation
of the first cascade through the falling of the tree across the
stream.

The principle of Joyce’s word scheme, is valid, as I have
tried briefly to demonstrate, for his vocabulary is an organic
part of the work and each word, whether it be in its natural
state or re-formed, has its purpose. At the same time, it
cannot be denied that, as an English writer recently said?
Joyce has disregarded the limited time and intelligence of
common men. He has drawn from an erudition that can be
communicated in its entirety to oniy a few scholars, especially
as his interests are so diversified. In addition to this, he has

169

sealed up many parts of the work to even the erudite reader
through the unamplified allusion to subjects familiar only to
himself or a limited number of people.

But this is a detail which does not seriously interfere with
the literary value of Work in Progress. The medium of
language remains at its best far from perfect, and it is seldom
that even a simple short story conveys the writer’s ideas in
all their shades to the reader’s mind. The merit of a work
of art cannot be estimated solely in relation to the extent of
its communication : that would be to consider artistic
value as acquired instead of intrinsic. No one who has read
the Portrait or Ulysses can doubt that Joyce is a writer of
extraordinary talents. If his latest work presents titanic
difficulties it is because of the reader’s insufficient equipment
rather than because Joyce has turned to writing gibberish.

And his latest book can be followed in its large lines by
any intelligent reader. Its labyrinths of words and ideas
and pictures become gradually less involved as one reads and
rereads the opulent text. It opens up continuously, pres-
enting new beauties and new wonders. The treasures subtly
buried in it offer ample rewards for the efforts spent in
reaching them.

It is possible that some day, when the book has been
completed and given a title, that it will be edited with
columns of footnotes prepared by industrious pedants after
years of research. 1 hope not, for one of the beauties of
Work in Pi'ogress is its mystery and its inexhaustible
promise of new revelations. Like the great books of all
times, it will always have different meanings for different
readers. To some its grandeur will be in its mixture of
legend, fact and myth, for others its chief interest will be a
technical one, others will find delight in its verbal and

170

rhythmic qualities, others will be moved by its cosmic comedy
and tragedy, and for still others its attraction will lie in its
boundless humor. But to everyone it should represent a
Cyclopean picture of humanity and the gods as viewed across
the aeons that the world has whirled its people through
space and the gods have given evidence of their indulgence
and wrath.

A POINT FOR AMERICAN CRITICISM

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

A POINT FOR AMERICAN CRITICISM

William Carlos Williams.

It is regrettable that Rebecca West’s article in The Book-
man, New York, for September should have appeared in the
United States. It puts both James Joyce and ourselves in a
bad light.

It begins with relish — carefully defined to remove false
implications. It is Paris, there is a pigeon bridging the rue
de rOdeon, Rebecca West has found two lines of a double
quatrain in a book of Joyce’s — Pomes Penyeach — which
she has come from purchasing. “ Suspicions had been
confirmed. What was cloudy was now solid. In those eight
lines he had ceased to belong to that vast army of our enemies,
the facts we do not comprehend ; he had passed over and be-
come one of our friends, one of those who have yielded up an
account of their nature, who do not keep back a secret
which one day may act like a bomb on each theory of the
universe that we have built for our defence. ”

“ For really, I reflected... Mr. James Joyce is a great man
who is entirely without taste. ”

She enters then upon a long account of a game of boules
played upon a highway in Provence to the constant interrup-
tion of passing vehicles, its points like those scored by the

174

sentimental artist. Shock. Finishing with an image of a
great umbrella-pine and the statement of the purpose of the
non-sen ti mental artist, as determined and exclusive as the
tree’s intention of becoming a tree. Very fine. Examples :
La Princesse de Cleves, Adolphe... She speaks of the bad
example of Mr. Arnold Bennett’s The Pretty Lady, of Kathe-
rine Mansfield’s weaknesses, the sentimentality of Charles
Dickens, implying at the same time the non-sentimental suc-
cesses of Tchekov. She compares the content of the young-
er American expressionist writers to that of East Lynn.

She states that, “ Seduced by the use of a heterodox techni-
que Joyce believes himself to be a wholly emancipated wri-
ter ”. Quite untrue. This is one of her characteristic pro-
nouncements.

But the sentimental artist (Joyce) is becoming nothing. ”

She criticises the drawing of Stephen Dedalus, “ He rolls
his, eyes, he wobbles on his base with suffering, like a Guido
Reni... a consequence of Mr. Joyce’s sentimental habit of
using his writing as a means for gratifying certain compul-
sions under which he labors, without making the first effort
towards lifting them over the threshold that divides life from
art ”. She objects to his use of obscene words on the same
grounds.

“ There is working here a narcissism, a compulsion to
make a self-image with an eye to the approval of others. ”

“ This is not to say that he does not write beautiful prose. ”
She refers to the scene of the young men bathing, in the early
part of Ulysses, and to the evocations of Marion Bloom, “the
great mother ”. “ But that does not alter the fact that James
Joyce is safe only when he stays within tradition ”, a path
prepared by Latin Poetry.

Following are detailed descriptions of Joyce’s short stories:

175

A Sa<J Case and The Dead, from Dubliners. “ These two
stories alone should explain why we rank James Joyce as a
major writer. ” Early work.

Nevertheless, “ There are two colossal finger-prints left by
literary incompetence on Ulysses First, the reasonlessness
of the close parallelism between Ulysses and the Odyssey
which Rebecca West finds execrable, since the theme of Ulys-
ses is essentially Manichaean and opposed to everything that
is Greek. She asks, in effect, what the devil is served by these
analogies ? But, Bloom being in Ireland a wanderer as Odys-
seus was a wanderer — she quite forgets that ten lines further
on she herself answers herself as to the appropriateness of
the parallel : “ When one looks at the works of art recovered
from the city of Khochu, which are our first intimations of
what Manichaeism, functioning as orthodoxy, produced other
than what we have gleaned from the report of its enemies,
one is amazed by the way that though the externals of Greek
are faithfully borrowed and respectfully superimposed on
more Oriental forms, the admission that there is a fundament-
al disharmony in nature causes it to create effects totally dif-
ferent from anything which we could possibly experience on
account of Greek Art. ” And why not ? Could anything be
more illuminating than such a contrast ? Could Joyce have
chosen a better way to say exactly what he means ?

The other “ colossal finger print ” occurs in the scene in
the Lying-In Hospital : “ The imitations of Bunyan and
Sterne, completely disprove all that is alleged concerning the
quality of Stephen’s mind... even allowing for the increasing
cloudiness of drunkenness. ” Possibly. But think of the
“ colossal ” slip of Ibsen in the First Scene, Act Four of
Peer Gynt, the Frenchman, the Englishman, the German and
the Swede on the Southwest Coast of Morocco, as dull a piece

176

of bullyragging as one could find anywhere in a work of ge-
nius. To speak of “ colossal incompetence” over lapses of
this sort — one need note only the word “ colossal

Now for line after line she goes on proving that sentences
originate before words. It is a pretty exposition. She brings
in cats, wild animals and babies. But what in God’s name
it has to do with any intention Joyce has had, not even after
three full paragraphs totalling a page of double columns and
small print, is she able to make clear; any relation, that is,
beyond her own, erroneous, intolerant assumption of Joyce’s
purpose.

In this way, she makes her points, some of them valid,
some not so good. I have not attempted to sum them all.
She goes at the work with a will and an enviable ability for
exposition. But all she says must be thrown out of account
as beside the question.

Here is the very thing most- inimical to all that is forward
looking in literature, going to pieces of its own fragility,
English criticism in a moment of over-extension come all
loose underneath. Here it is proving itself inadequate to
hold a really first-rate modern moment, hanging as it must
still be with gross imperfections.

I saw Rebecca West straining toward some insistence she
could not quitteachieve so that she appeared wholly off balance.
The evidences of exaggeration and nervousness are in such
things as the exhilaration at the start, the suspiciously lyric
dove, the bold but unsupported pronouncements recurring
through the text. But especially it appeared in the initial
step of the logic, the stress upon the two lines of the little
poem which would cast a searchlight of significance over all
that goes before and comes after them. “ The most stupen-
dous ”, “ colossal ”, etc., etc. There is the table-pounding

177

of the “ right, by Jove ” attitude, the ex-cathedra “ this is
so Ending finally in the summary verdict that because of
his sentimental defects Joyce must be, is, in fact, debarred
from the privilege of launching a technical advance in literary
form ; that he is great only as a conventional writer in a trad-
ition, that of Latin poetry ; the rest gibberish — nonsense.

It means just that Joyce, firing from Paris has outranged
English criticism completely and that R. W., with fair skill,
is penning not so much an attack on Joyce — whom she tre-
mendously admires — but a defense, a defense littered by a
dire necessity to save all that she loves and represents, lest
what he had done may “ one day act like a bomb on each
theory of the universe that we have built for our defence ” :
all accountable to an inadequacy of critical ressource in a re-
spectable orthodoxy.

British criticism, like any other, is built upon the exigencies
of the local literary structure and relates primarily thereto.
Afterward it may turn to the appraisal of heterodox and
foreign works. But if these are in nature disruptive to the
first, the criticism will be found to be (first) defensive, to pre-
serve its origins. Only when an acknowledged break has
been forced upon it can any criticism mend itself in a way to
go up into a more commanding position. Rebecca West is
solely defensive in what she says of Joyce. Within the tra-
dition lies “ perfection ”, the Sacred Grope, a study of Dry-
den. Outside is imperfection and formative chaos.

It is quite impossible for British critical orthodoxy (R. W.
its spokesman) to say that Joyce’s imperfections are of incon-
sequence, in view of something else larger. For if it (she)
does so, it invalidates it’s own major pretence to being an
inclusive whole made up of mutually related parts. It can
only say this is within, that is outside the pale.

We recognize its inviolable methods. But once having said
that, we must step beyond it, to follow Joyce. It is able, it
is erudite, it is ill-tempered and correct — due to its limited
size and the opportunity offered thereby for measurement
and thorough exploration.

Rebecca West cannot take Joyce, as a whole, into the body
of English literature for fear of the destructive force of such
an act. She must dodge and be clever and find fault and
praise. She can only acknowledge genius and defect, she
cannot acknowledge an essential relationship between the ge-
nius and the defect. She cannot say that on the basis of
Joyce’s effort, the defect is a consequence of the genius which,
to gain way, has superseded the restrictions of the orthodox
field. She cannot say that it is the break that has released
the genius — and that the defects are stigmata of the break.
She cannot link the two as an indissoluble whole — but she
must put defect to the right, genius to the left’ British criti-
cism in the center, where it is wholly forced ; a thorough
imposition.

Joyce does offend in taste. Joyce is sentimental in his
handling of his material. He does deform his drawing and
allow defective characterizations to creep in. But this does
not at all debar him from making valid technical innovations
in literary form, as R. W. must say it does. Both are due to
the suddenness, the leap of a new force.

♦ ♦

It is all to an American just the English viewpoint, an old
basis, without further capacity for extension and nearly ready
to be discarded forever. Nearly.

Forward is the new. It will not be blamed. It will not

179

force it self into what amounts to paralyzing restrictions. It
cannot be correct. It hasn’t time. It has that which is be-
yond measurement, which renders measurement a falsification,
since the energy is showing itself as recrudescent, the measur-
ement being the aftermath of each new outburst.

Joyce has broken through and drags his defects with him,
a thing English criticism cannot tolerate.

But even so, Rebecca West does not always play the game,
even within her own boundaries, — it is the strain she is
under. A descent to Freudian expedients of classification is
in a literary discussion a mark of defeat. Here is a mixing
of categories, a fault in logic — that is unimaginable in a per-
son of orderly mind.

It has always been apparent to me that references to Freud
— except as Freud — are in a literary discussion particularly
out of place. But the use of Freudian arguments and classi-
fications as critical staves is really too much. The reasons
are simple. Freud like other psychologists uses the same
material as literature but in another mode. To use the force
of psychology in a category foreign to its devices is to betray
the very essence of logic.

It must be patent that in any of the Freudian classifications
a man may produce good writing. That is, it may be good
or bad in any Freudian catagory. Comment if you like on
Joyce’s narcissism but what in the world has it to do with
him as a writer ? Of course it has, as far as prestige is con-
cerned, but not as to writing — a division which R. W. seems
anxious to make when she calls him a genius. But the ex-
pedient is convenient if we want to gain a spurious (psycho-
logic, not literary) advantage for temporal purposes.

What Joyce is saying is a literary thing. It is a literary
value he is forwarding. He is a writer. Will this never be

i8o

understood ? Perhaps he is fixed in his material and cannot
change. It is of no consequence. The writing is, however,
changing, the writing is active. It is in the writing that the
power exists. Joyce is a literary man writing as he may —
with as much affection from his material, his Freudian
category as — Esop from his hump or Scarron from his
nerves. It is stupid, it is narrow British to think to use that
against him.

The thing is, they want to stay safe, they do not want to
give up something, so thay enlist psychology to save them.
But under it they miss the clear, actually the miraculous,
benefits of literature itself. A silent flower opening out of
the dung they dote on. They miss Joyce blossoming pure
w'hite above their heads. They are literary critics. That’s
what gets me.

Usually something has been disturbed, possibly outraged —
so they search around, muck around in psychology for what
cause to blame, instead of searching in the writing, in liter-
ature, for the reason. They shut the eyes, do nothing about
the fact of the writing or cry “ genius ” — and avoid the
issue. They forget that literature, like all other effects,
by genius transcends the material, no matter what it is.
That it, by itself, raises the thing that is to be observed into
a rarer field. I don’t give a damn what Joyce happens by the
chances of his life to be writing of, any more than I care
about the termination of the story of Pantagruel and the
Sibyl. Shock there if you wish.

And this is the opportunity of America I to see large,
larger than England can.

An appearance of synchroneity between American and
English literature has made it seem, especially at certain times,
as if English criticism could overlay the American strain as

it does the English. This cannot be so. The differences are
epochal. Every time American strength goes into a mould
modelled after the English, it is wholly wasted. There is an
American criticism that applies to American literature — all
too unformed to speak of positively. This American thing it
is that would better fit the Irish of Joyce.

Their duty is to conserve and explain in relation to esta-
blished facts — that is all. We Americans ourselves must
still rely on English models. But we must not be misled.
We have to realize that an English dictum on any work is,
for us, only an approximation. It exists only as an analogous
appraisal, as far as we are concerned, to fill a lack on our part
of actual value.

A faultfinding elucidation of Joyce’s work gives Rebecca
West a final satisfaction. This is what is meant by the term
“ insular”. Surrounded, limited yet intact. It is the exact
counterpart of the physical characteristic of England. They
have attempted freedom but achieved only extension of insul-
arity, for the central fear remains.

With hieratical assurance Rebecca West lays down her
fiats about everything, rising to a transcendental ecstasy at
last and the longing for a spiritual triumph and the life
onward and upward forever. She is speaking, that is, of a
life nearly at its end, just as a younger culture or one at its
beginning, in full vigor, wishes for a fusion of the spirit with
life as it exists here on earth in mud and slime today.

Truly her conception of the Shakespearean fool, to whom
she likens Joyce’s mental processes, is cloacal if anything
could be so, with his japes and antics which so distress her
thought, in that transcendental dream in which the spirit is
triumphant — somewhere else. Whereas here is the only
place where we know the spirit to exist at all, befouled as it is

i82

by lies. Joyce she sees as a “ fool ” dragging down the great
and the good to his own foul level, making the high spirit
“ prove ” its earthy baseness by lowering itself to laugh at
low truth. “ And that is why James Joyce is treated by this
age with a respect which is more than the due of his compe-
tence : why Pomes Penyeach had been sold to me in Sylvia
Beach’s bookshop as if it had been a saint’s medal on the
porch of Westminster Cathedral. ”

But the true significance of the fool is to consolidate life*
to insist on its lowness, to knit it up, to correct a certain
fatuousness in the round table circle. Life is not to run ofi
into dream but to remain one, from low to high. If you care
to go so far, the fool is the premonition of the Russian Revo-
lution, to modern revolutions in thought.

Whereas R. W.’s attitude is not noble, an escape from
the underground burrows of lust”, but is bred of a terminal
process of life that is ending, since in an old society, as in an
old criticism, exhaustion takes place finally. Lear’s fool,
however, is far from what R. W. paints his genus to be, but
is full of compassion. Joyce, where he stoops low, has in
him all the signs of a beginning. It is a new literature, a
new world, that he is undertaking.

Rebecca ’West, on the other hand, has no idea at all
what literature is about. She speaks of transcendental
tosh, of Freud, of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, of anything
that comes into her head, but she has not yet learned —
though she professes to know the difference between art and
life — the sentimental and the nonsentimental that writ-
ing is made of words. And that in just this essential Joyce
is making a technical advance which she is afraid to acknow-
ledge — that is actually cutting away all England from under
her.

183

But Joyce knows — in spite of every barrier — in and out,
self and world. And he is purifying his effort (in a new
work) which she calls gibberish.

Joyce is breaking with a culture older than England’s when
he goes into his greatest work. It is the spirit liberated to
run through everything, that makes him insist on unexpurg-
ated lines and will not brook the limitations which good taste
would enforce. It is to break the limitations, not to conform
to the taste that his spirit runs.

Naturally they strain to drag him back.

Here it is : he is going somewhere, they are going nowhere.
They are still looking back weighing (good enough); he is
going on, carrying what he needs and what he can. What
good is it, as far as literature is concerned, to have observed,
felt the pangs of sorrow that Joyce is recognized, even by
R. W., to feel if he is doing nothing about it — as literature?
As literature. He is a writer broken-hearted over the world
(stick to literature as his chosen symbol). Broken-hearted
people do not bother about the place their tears are falling
or the snot of their noses. As literature, Joyce is going on
like French painters by painting, to find someway out of his
sorrow — by literary means. (Stay within the figure which
R. W. cannot do.) As a writer he is trying for new means.
He is looking ahead to find if there be a way, a literary way
(in his chosen category) to save the world — or call it (as a
figure) to save the static, worn out language.

Here Joyce has so far outstripped the criticism of Rebecca
West that she seems a pervert. Here is his affinity for slang.
Even if he has to lay waste the whole English structure. It
is that the older critics smell and — they are afraid.

He is moving on relentlessly in his literary modes to find a
way out. This is notan ordered advance of troops. Or it is

one place only in the attack. The whole bulk of the antago-
nist looms above him to make him small, But the effect is
tremendous.

To me Rebecca West’s view seems incompatible with Ame-
rican appreciation, and though her observations appear
mainly true, they seem narrow, inadequate, even provincial,
certainly scared, protestant female — unsatisfactory. A little
ill-natured, a little sliding ; what might be termed typically
British and should be detected as such from the American
view, a criticism not quite legitimate, save for England where
it may be proper due to national exigencies like the dementia
ofWyndham Lewis.

* *

Joyce maims words. Why ? Because meanings have been
dulled, then lost, then perverted by their connotations (which
have grown over them) until their effect on the mind is no
longer what it was when they were fresh, but grows rotten as
poi — though we may get to like pot.

Meanings are perverted by time and chance — • but kept
perverted by academic observance and intention. At worst
they are inactive and get only the static value of anything,
which retains its shape but is dead. All words, all sense of
being is gone out of them. Or trained into them by the drill
of the deadly minded. Joyce is restoring them.

Reading Joyce last night when my mind was fluid from
fatigue, my eyes bulging and painful but my spirit jubilant
following a successful termination of a fight between my two
boys I had brought to an intelligent end — subverted and
used to teach them tolerance — I saw I

Joyce has not changed his words beyond recognition.

They remain to a quick eye the same. But many of the stulti-
fying associations of the brutalized mind (brutalized by
modern futility) have been lost in his process.

The words are freed to be understood again in an original,
a fresh, delightful sense.

Lucid they do become. Plain, as they have not been for a
lifetime, we see them.

In summary : Rebecca West makes (is made by) a mould ;
English criticism, a product of English literature. She states
her case for art. It is an excellent digest but for a world
panorama inadequate. She fails to fit Joyce to it. She calls
him, therefore, “ strange ”, not realizing his compulsions
which are outside of her sphere. In support of this, she
builds a case against him, using Freudian and other non-liter-
ary weapons. She is clever, universal in her informational
resorts. What is new left over — Joyce’s true significance —
his pure literary virtue — is for her “ nonsense ”. Of litera-
ture and its modus showing that she knows nothing. Ame-
rica, offering an undeveloped but wider criticism, will take
this opportunity to place an appreciation of Joyce on its pro-
per basis.

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TWO LETTERS OF PROTEST

WRITES A COMMON READER

G. V. L. Slingsby.

It was with considerable trepidation that I opened the
pages of the new work by Mr. James Joyce. Upon finishing
Ulysses it had seemed to me unlikely that a man could go
much further in literature. After all Ulysses was making
literature wear seven league boots and having to take consid-
erable in its stride at that. So when I began to read this new
volume, and found what seemed pages of madness I was
not surprised, I was ready to believe it the madness not
ot the lunatic asylum but of a man whose sensibilities along
certain lines have been developed far beyond those of his
readers and who is therefore unintelligible to them.

I had hoped that Mr. Joyce might have brought his
extremely interesting idea of presenting a character in the
light of his emotions, his actions, and his stream of
consciouness, to a greater perfection of handling, but I was
ready to sit at his feet for any further word that the writer of
Ulysses might have to say. So that my trepidation developed
into definite disappointment as I tried to penetrate the maze
of printing that Mr. Joyce would evidently have us regard as
a serious work.

For he appears to have entirely abandoned the height of

IC)0

his great argument to toy with an idea not new, but never I
believe carried out to this extent, of making words serve as
music and letting their sound convey a meaning quite apart
from the actual specific meaning of each word. Miss Gertrude
Stein has experimented along this line but up to the present
she has contented herself with the quite simple madness that
one can produce with already existing words. Mr. Joyce
however has gone her one better and invented his own words
if you can dignify them by that name.

Now there is no doubt that so far as reading words for
sound is concerned we are but simple cave men with only
the most elemental ideas of what might constitute rhythm,
tone, and expression so it is extremely difficult for a reader
in the folk tune stage of development to be faced with a
literary Sacre du Printemps for full orchestra. One can but
struggle. And in th«s case as you read on and on you have
the sensation gadually increasing, of a temperature risen to
meningital heights and you feel that by the end of another
page you will have joined the coverlet pickers.

Whether or not a public can ever be trained to absorb this
kind of thing seems to me extremely doubtful. The sort of
person who will spend time in the exercise of a new set of
muscles such, for instance, as for ear wagging, might be
interested in developing a new set of brain or reciving cells,
always supposing such cells exist.

After a few minutes of reading I tried to erase irom my
consciousness the knowledge that the book bore so signif-
icant a name as that of James' Joyce. I tried to put myself
in the place of, say, the dentist’s waiting room reader, who
will bury himself in any bit of printed matter, from Archaeo-
logy to steam fitting, to escape the acute apprehension of his
impending doom. After a half hours reading from that

angle I came to the conclusion that I should think the book
written by a clever rogue with a somewhat Rabelasian
tongue in his cheek. For if one abandons the search for
beauty of sound in this work one is struck by a certain
significance in this method of shading off actual words and
inventing others. Is Mr. Joyce*s hog latin making obscenity
safe for literature ?

Or is he like an enormously clever little boy trying to see
how far he can go with his public? Did he write this book
while balancing a lamp on a whip with the other hand, or
is he the Milhaud or Honegger of literature ?

It is to be hoped that Mr. Joyce who is so profoundly
respected and has been so ardently followed by the youth of
his generation, is not turning on his current to make the
animals jump instead of to shed further illumination on the
paths of his real readers.

A LITTER

Mr. James Joyce.

Dear Mister Germ’s Choice,

in gutter dispear I am taking my pen toilet you know that,
being Leyde up in bad with the prewailent distemper (I opened
the window and in flew Enza), I have been reeding one half
ter one other the numboars of ‘ ‘ transition ” in witch are printed
the severeall instorments of your “ Work in Progress”.

You must not stink I am attempting to ridicul (de sad )
you of to be smart, but I am so disturd by my inhumility to
onthorstand most of the impslocations constrained in your
work that (although I am by nominals dump and in fact I
consider myself not brilliantly ejewcatered but still of above
Averroege men’s tality and having maid the most of the oporto
unities I kismet) I am writing you, dear mysterre Shame’s
Voice, to let you no how bed I feeloxerab out it all.

I am uberzeugt that the labour involved in the composti-
tion of your work must be almost supper humane and that so
much travail from a man of your intellacked must ryeseult
in somethink very signicophant. I would only like to know
have I been so strichnine by my illnest white wresting under
my warm Coverlyette that 1 am as they say in my neightive

194

land “ out of the mind gone out ’’ and unable to combpre-
hen that which is clear or is there really in your work some
ass pecked which is Uncle Lear?

Please froggive my t’ Emeritus and any inconvince that may
have been caused by this litter.

Y ours veri tass

Vladimir Dixon

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LITERATURE/isbn: 0-8112-0446-4

THIRD PRINTING

james

]oyce/Finnegans Wake

A SYMPOSIUM

Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of
Work in Progress is unique among the many books Finnegans
Wake has evoked from other writers. This symposium was pub-
lished in Paris ten years before Joyce’s work in progress
(Finnegans Wake) was completed and the contributors were all
friends or acquaintances of the author: Samuel Beckett, Marcel
Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona,
Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker,
Robert Sage and William Carlos Williams. There are also
‘Letters of Protest’ from G. V. L. Slingsby and Vladimir Dixon.

Prepared in such circumstances, with the active encouragement
of James Joyce, the book could only have appeared under
one imprint, that of Shakespeare and Company, publishers of
Ulysses. This edition also includes the characteristic intro-
duction by Miss Sylvia Beach, the original publisher.

Also by James Joyce: Stephen Hero, N DPI 33, $4.95.

A NEW DIRECTIONS PAPERBOOK NDP331 $5.95

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